Research On Relevance Judgment Of Collaborative Information Seeking And Retrieval

As a research focus in the filed of Library and Information Science.the scope and content of studies on Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval is continuing to be broadened Presently. However, Relevance,which is the core concept of information seeking and retrieval and one of the basic principles in Information Science, has only been few studied add:in collaborative information seeking and retrieval. There is still la lot of problems about the relevance and relevance judgment in the filed of collaborative information seeking and retrieval This article is to conduct a study to explore the relevance judgment behavior of group of users in collaborative information seeking and retrieval.In this paper, data on relevance judgment behavior in collaborative information seeking and retrieval in the context of real life information need are collected through thinking aloud,observation, interviews and other methods in five cases,and then are analyzed both by initial coding,focused coding and theory coding under Grounded Theory and cases comparing, finally a initial collaborative relevance criteria scale is developed and tested.The main content and results of this study are,(1)This article develops17conceptual categories about collaborative information seeking and retrieval through Grounded Theory coding, including individuals and groups of seekers, the practical tasks, information seeking and retrieval tasks, collaborative relevance judgment, division of labor, and information exchanging. Based on these categories, a comparative study on the five cases is compared from three levels of the subject, context and behavior, then a model of collaborative information seeking and retrieval process is constructed.(2)This article describes the behavioral characteristics and influencing factors of relevance judgment in collaborative information seeking and retrieval process. On the basis of detailed analysis of the conceptual category about relevance judgment in collaborative information seeking and retrieval. the behavioral characteristics of collaborative relevance judgment among group of users are analyzed from three levels of communication, cognition and decision-making, and five major influencing factors are proposed, including the individuals and groups of seekers, collaborative information seeking and retrieval tasks, search results, situations, the manifestation of judgment and exchange on judgment result.(3)This article constructs a model of collaborative relevance judgment process of group of users.This article explains that the nature of relevance is the relationship of information needs and search results, and constructs a model of relevance in collaborative information seeking and retrieval.(4)A collaborative relevance criteria scale is developed in this article. Based on the codes of category and the collection from related literatures, a5-point Likert scale is developed and tested through project analysis, exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis, finally a formal collaborative relevance criteria scale is developed in this article.