Locating the expertise necessary to solve difficult problems is a nuanced social and collaborative problem. In organizations, some people assist others in locating expertise by making referrals. People who make referrals fill key organizational roles that have been identified by CSCW and affiliated research. Expertise locating systems are not designed to replace people who fill these key organizational roles. Instead, expertise locating systems attempt to decrease workload and support people who have no other options. Recommendation systems are collaborative software that can be applied to expertise locating. This work describes a general recommendation architecture that is grounded in a field study of expertise locating. Our expertise recommendation system details the work necessary to fit expertise recommendation to a work setting. The architecture and implementation begin to tease apart the technical aspects of providing good recommendations from social and collaborative concerns.

What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call “libraries”? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope to encourage, and in some small measure to shape, the dialog among computer scientists, librarians, and other interested parties out of which answers may arise. Our contribution here is to make explicit, and to question, certain assumptions that underlie current digital library efforts. We will argue that current efforts are limited by a largely unexamined COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM April 1995/Vol. 38, No. 4 77 and unintended allegiance to an idealized view of what libraries have been, rather than what they actually are or could be. Since these limits come from current ways of thinking about the problem, rather than being inherent in the technology or in social practice, expanding our conception of digital libraries should serve to expand the scope and the

In this article we investigate the expressions of collaborative activities within information seeking and retrieval processes (IS&R). Generally, information seeking and retrieval is regarded as an individual and isolated process in IR research. We assume that an IS&R situation is not merely an individual effort, but inherently involves various collaborative activities. We present empirical results from a real-life and information-intensive setting within the patent domain, showing that the patent task performance process involves highly collaborative aspects throughout the stages of the information seeking and retrieval process. Furthermore, we show that these activities may be categorized and related to different stages in an information seeking and retrieval process. Therefore, the assumption that information retrieval performance is purely individual needs to be reconsidered. Finally, we also propose a refined IR framework involving collaborative aspects.

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The research field of digital libraries must be viewed as a union of subfields from a variety of domains combined with new research issues in order to realize its full potential. A clear exposition of the research issues involved has not yet been given. Most approaches to building digital library systems have thus far been limited to addressing specific digital library problems as variations of problems from other fields. This paper presents a taxonomy of digital library elements. Consideration of the elements in this taxonomy helps suggest a variety of issues. Example elements and some issues they suggest are used to populate the taxonomy. The paper continues by presenting a general digital library system architecture. Issues suggested by the taxonomy are shown to have implications at many levels of digital library system architectures for both design and implementation. This is illustrated by considering the implications of one issue (personalizing presentations) at several architectural levels and in the context of a set of current technologies.

Enterprise communication applications rely on automated reasoning about factors such as expertise for connecting people. Quantifying expertise is necessary for such applications because of the time constraints imposed by communications routing. This paper discusses the potential for collaborative tagging in the enterprise and how it enables the formation of social networks around tags or topics. These social networks are reflective of the interests and expertise of users contributing to the tag. The tagging activity of a user contributes to the expertise of the user and influences the expertise of other users. The paper proposes a ranking mechanism for expertise based on the tagging activity of users for both unstructured and structured tag spaces. The paper also briefly describes a communication platform that will incorporate the ranking mechanism.

Large information repositories, such as the World Wide Web or Usenet News, offer an amazing wealth of information. Searching for valuable information is an effort that permanently occurs in organizations and that contributes to the organizational memory. Active collaborative filtering builds on the exploitation of the results of this effort by encouraging the members of an organization to share information with others. To this extent, the members are provided with a tool that allows for the distribution of information with little effort. However, it is unclear which strategy is best to bootstrap or to enhance a self-supporting information dissemination activity. In this paper, we report on experiences we made when trying to bootstrap an active collaborative filtering activity in a mediumsize organization. Our experiences suggest to view collaborative filtering as groupware in order to explain certain difficulties and to learn from the experiences with groupware. 1 Introduction Large ...

To find interesting, personally relevant web content, people rely on friends and colleagues to pass links along as they encounter them. In this paper, we study and augment linksharing via e-mail, the most popular means of sharing web content today. Armed with survey data indicating that active sharers of novel web content are often those that actively seek it out, we developed FeedMe, a plug-in for Google Reader that makes directed sharing of content a more salient part of the user experience. FeedMe recommends friends who may be interested in seeing content that the user is viewing, provides information on what the recipient has seen and how many emails they have received recently, and gives recipients the opportunity to provide lightweight feedback when they appreciate shared content. FeedMe introduces a novel design space within mixed-initiative social recommenders: friends who know the user voluntarily vet the material on the user’s behalf. We performed a two-week field experiment (N=60) and found that FeedMe made it easier and more enjoyable to share content that recipients appreciated and would not have found otherwise.

Abstract. The How-To has recently emerged as a genre of online content that describes how something is done. This study focuses on computer and electronics hobbyists and their use of How-Tos—how hobbyists use existing knowledge to solve technical challenges, how they document their new knowledge for one another, and how they exchange help and feedback. Our analysis describes How-To knowledge sharing as a fully decentralized expertise-location system in which the How-To functions as both a broadcast of the author’s expertise and a personal portfolio.

This paper is a review of the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) with respect to digital libraries. The literature surveyed covers both library & information science and computer science. An overview of the field of CSCW is provided including requirements capture, ethnography, interfaces, toolkits, organisational memory etc. Collaboration is interpreted in a wide sense and systems supporting user-staff (e.g. remote reference) and user-user (e.g. collaborative filtering) interactions are described.