Today's complex information-intensive problems often require people to work together. Mostly
these tasks go far beyond simply searching together they include information lookup sharing
synthesis and decision-making. In addition they all have an end-goal that is mutually
beneficial to all parties involved. Such collaborative information seeking (CIS) projects
typically last several sessions and the participants all share an intention to contribute and
benefit. Not surprisingly these processes are highly interactive. Shah focuses on two
individually well-understood notions: collaboration and information seeking with the goal of
bringing them together to show how it is a natural tendency for humans to work together on
complex tasks. The first part of his book introduces the general notions of collaboration and
information seeking as well as related concepts terminology and frameworks and thus
provides the reader with a comprehensive treatment of the concepts underlying CIS. The second
part of the book details CIS as a standalone domain. A series of frameworks theories and
models are introduced to provide a conceptual basis for CIS. The final part describes several
systems and applications of CIS along with their broader implications on other fields such as
computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI). With this
first comprehensive overview of an exciting new research field Shah delivers to graduate
students and researchers in academia and industry an encompassing description of the
technologies involved state-of-the-art results and open challenges as well as research
opportunities.
