Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five-month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our field study. Keywords Expertise networks, knowledge networks, computermediated communications, expert locators, expertise location, expertise finding, information seeking, CSCW, compu...

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.

This paper investigates an important, yet under-researched topic in CSCW, namely shared, or common, information spaces. We provide some background to work in the area, and then proceed to examine features of such spaces. The work involved in both putting information in common, and in interpreting it, has often not been sufficiently recognized. Through a number of situations we discuss the influence of particular conditions, and the translations required. We show how, in various ways, it requires added work to place items in common, and open up the question of how this might affect use of the WWW, often seen as the ultimate common information space. 1. Introduction One of the distinguishing features of the CSCW field is its persistent attempts to come to terms with the sociality of work, with a view to better understanding the nature of cooperative work as a basis for designing genuinely "supportive" computer-based information systems. In its attempts to achieve this goa

Most cooperative work takes place in information-rich environments. However, studies of "information work" tend to focus on the decontextualized access and retrieval problems faced by individual information seekers. Our work is directed towards understanding how information management is seamlessly integrated into the course of everyday activities. Drawing on an ethnographic study of medical work, we explore the relationship between information and temporal coordination and discuss the role of temporal patterns or "rhythms" in providing individuals with the means to coordinate information and work.

Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge Management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate.

Local mobility is a central aspect of collaborative work that is in need of close analysis. Between the face-to-face interaction of offices or control rooms and longdistance interaction facilitated through e.g. telephones, e-mail, the www or teleconferences lie a number of work-settings in which actors move about continuously in order to accomplish their work. They do so because they need to get access to knowledge, resources, persons and/or places. We analyze the integral nature of mobility to this kind of work practice from the ethnographic description of a hospital department, and the challenges that actors have to face to accomplish their work. Based on this ethnographic case, we propose a set of concepts for understanding local mobility as an intermediate field of distributed cooperation between centres of coordination and remote collaboration. Finally, we introduce the concept of `mobility work' as complementary to the concept of `articulation work'.

The social and organizational aspects of digital libraries are often overlooked but this paper reviews how they can affect users ’ awareness and acceptance of digital libraries. An analysis of research conducted within two contrasting domains (Clinical and Academic) is presented which highlights issues of user interactions, work practices and the organizational social structures. The combined study comprises an analysis of 98 in-depth interviews and focus groups with lecturers, librarians and hospital clinicians. The importance of current and past roles of the library, and how users interacted with it, are revealed. Web-based digital libraries, while alleviating most library resource and interaction problems, require a change in librarians ’ and DL designers ’ roles and interaction patterns if they are to be implemented acceptably and effectively. Without this role change, users will at best be unaware of these digital resources and at worst feel threatened by them. The findings of this paper highlight the importance on DL design and implementation of the social context and supporting user communication (i.e. collaboration and consultation) in their information search and usage activities.

The temporal elements of users’ information requirements are a continually confounding aspect of digital library design. No sooner have users’ needs been identified and supported than they change. This paper evaluates the changing information requirements of users through their ‘information journey’ in two different domains (health and academia). In-depth analysis of findings from interviews, focus groups and observations of 150 users have identified three stages to this journey: information initiation, facilitation (or gathering) and interpretation. The study shows that, although digital libraries are supporting aspects of users’ information facilitation, there are still requirements for them to better support users’ overall information work in context. Users are poorly supported in the initiation phase, as they recognize their information needs, especially with regard to resource awareness; in this context, interactive press-alerts are discussed. Some users (especially clinicians and patients) also required support in the interpretation of information, both satisfying themselves that the information is trustworthy and understanding what it means for a particular individual.

Abstract. CSCW has long been concerned with the distribution of activities in time and in space, but the problems of distributed work have often taken analytic and technical precedence. In this paper, we are interested in the issue of temporality in collaborative work. In particular, we want to examine how the temporal organization of action is experienced by those who are involved in it. To investigate this phenomenon, we conducted a field study of medical workers in a surgical intensive care unit. Through this study, we highlight the temporal organization of the work. In particular, we introduce and describe three temporal features – temporal trajectories, temporal rhythms, and temporal horizons – that emerge from and influence the work of healthcare providers as they attempt to seek, provide, and manage information during the course of their daily work. Key words: collaborative work, medical work, information seeking, temporality 1.

This study is designed to clarify important features of social network analysis for analyzing community-based activities in a CSCL setting. The theoretical and methodological background is social/communication network analysis, which is employed to identify and understand students' communication and interaction patterns when collaborating through wireless computer networking tools. Thirty-two students were given high-end laptops with access to the wireless Internet, and their use of and communicative patterns via these systems were gathered through a proxy server. Findings show that social influences, in the form of network prestige effects, strongly affected the likelihood and the extent to which information posted in the CSCL environment was shared by peers in this learning community.