Supporting Collaborative Information Seeking Through Shared Annotations

This paper presents an argument that information systems may support deeper engagement between readers and the text by realizing the capacity for readers to take more active roles while seeking information. Information systems could support collaborative information seeking by displaying shared annotations. Subsequent readers would be able to leverage the semantic information encoded within the shared annotations to interact with the text in more efficient and effective ways. Different types of collaboration and contexts in which it occurs will likely influence the ways in which shared annotations are used by readers and information systems to support collaborative information seeking. Directions for exploring the applications of shared annotations are discussed, concluding with four research questions for future work.