Opportunities and Challenges in Searching

Prepared for Social Aspects of Digital Libraries Workshop, UCLA, February 16-17, 1996

1. Understand the activity of searching and model new systems around the end user information seeking process (in the broadest sense), rather than simply building new search tools that provide function outside the context of this process. Further, recognize that this is both an individual and a group (social) process; accommodate and provide support for the social aspects of the information seeking process in new search systems.

2. Incorporate a "long time horizon" view of the information seeking process in search support systems; recognize and build upon the observation that a great deal of searching is a long-term, iterative process of interaction between the user and the information sources. As part of this activity, design highly "personalized" information systems that learn about the user's needs, interests and existing state of knowledge in a meaningful way. This implies an increasingly rich social relationship between the user and the search system.

3. Users in the network environment will increasingly be confronted with and wish to integrate multiple, diverse, and conflicting information sources of varying quality. Develop a framework for relating the user through searching systems to a range of competing, partially overlapping information sources and for accommodating the user's evolving view and evaluation of these multiple information sources. As a further extension, recognize that the evolving evaluation of information sources is both a personal and a group social activity; relate, through information access systems, the individual and group perceptions and evaluations of these information sources.

4. Treat newsgroups, mailing lists and related information distribution systems as communities of communications, and develop tools to help participants in these communities (and particularly relatively casual participants that may join and leave these communities repeatedly, and that may be primarily readers rather than active participants) to shape and structure a personal view of the community over time, thus providing a filter on information provided to the community. Relate social views of the participants in these communities (the authority and quality of contributions by participants) to these personal views.

5. It has been suggested that we are moving into an environment characterized by an "economics of attention" -- one where human attention is the scarce commodity that information providers compete for in a world containing too much relevant information. Understand the social and personal aspects of this economics of scarcity of attention and integrate this understanding into search support systems. For example, develop systems that can help the user to determine how best to spend the few hours he or she has available to become knowledgeable about a topic.

6. The networked information environment represents a vibrant economy of information, rumor, deliberate or accidental misinformation and disinformation, and competing views. Develop search systems to assist users in recognizing, navigating, and searching these classes of information. Note that this requires a very different view of the available information resources than typical search systems, which view information sources as static, unrelated to each other, and do not pay much attention to information sources; in the framework being proposed information is dynamic and evolves over time; the sources of information are of critical importance; and the relationship of information from different sources is of considerable interest.

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