Division of labour in collaborative information seeking: Current approaches and future directions

It is now recognised that people often collaborate when completing information seeking tasks, and a number of specialised tools and systems have been developed to support such behaviour. Such systems often allow for distribution of search results among collaborators. The goal of this division of labour is to enable concurrent work while also preventing redundancy in results distribution. This paper consolidates prior work on division of labour in collaborative information seeking systems by reviewing four approaches to creating division of labour. We then briefly describe our own research before laying out some future directions, which we hope will promote discussion at the workshop.