Don Turnbull

Personalized search

A contextual computing approach may prove a breakthrough in personalized search efficiency.

Working the Web: an empirical model of Web use

This paper investigates how knowledge workers utilize the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty four participants from seven companies were interviewed about their information needs and preferences. In addition, a custom-developed software application recorded each participants Web behavior for a two week monitoring period. To understand better the significant episodes of activity identified in the Web tracking logs, a second round of personal interviews was conducted. The study found that people who use the Web as part of their work engage in four complementary modes of undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. Moreover, each mode is characterized by information seeking moves based on recurrent sequences of browser functions and features. Based on these findings, a model of Web use is presented, as well as some suggestions for supporting and enhancing Web information seeking in organizations.

Advertising academia with sponsored search: an exploratory study examining the effectiveness of Google AdWords at the local and global level

An exploratory study conducted in late autumn and early winter 2006-2007 investigates the purchasing of sponsored search advertising for a major US universitys academic department. The ad campaign used Googles AdWord service with the goal of increasing awareness of the academic department and encouraging potential graduate admissions or admissions inquiries. A behavioural model of information seeking is suggested that could be applied for selecting appropriate types of online advertising for awareness and other advertising goals. The study found little overlap between traditional, commerce-oriented online advertising methods and a general awareness campaign, as evidenced by a low click-through rate to the targeted site. Insights for future studies include increased integration with server logs, targeted site query terms and alternative awareness strategies.

Rating, voting & ranking: designing for collaboration & consensus

The OpenChoice system, currently in development, is an open source, open access community rating and filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. The goal of OpenChoice is to encourage community involvement in making filtering classification more accurate and to increase awareness in the current approaches to content filtering. The design challenge for OpenChoice is to find the best interfaces for encouraging easy participation amongst a community of users, be it for voting, rating or discussing Web page content. This work in progress reviews some initial designs while reviewing best practices and designs from popular Web portals and community sites.

Reading and searching digital documents: An experimental analysis of the effects of image quality on user performance and perceived effort

As increasing amounts of information are viewed, read and manipulated digitally, many users still report performance and satisfaction costs with digital documents compared to paper equivalents. While many factors impact this process, image quality has been assumed by many to have relatively little impact once current screen display standards are maintained. We test this hypothesis by comparing users on a variety of routine information tasks performed on standard and enhanced screen displays. Using Microsoft ClearType, a font technology which enhances text display resolution by accessing vertical color stripes at the pixel level, we examined user performance on reading, editing and searching tasks with routine office applications. Results suggest that for tasks involving lengthy eye-on-text interaction (e.g., reading for comprehension) advances in image quality can still yield significant improvements in performance for most users.

Information seeking and use in diverse organizational contexts

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together ways of thinking about information seeking and use in diverse organizational contexts. Organizational contexts are not uniform. Quite the contrary, they are very diverse in terms of the individuals, cultures, habits, routines, systems and infrastructures within them. The panelists offer varying viewpoints on how to best address information seeking and use diversity in the workplace. Though each panelist offers different perspectives on how to do this, collectively they rally a persuasive need to not assume homogeneity in our understanding and investigation of information seeking and use in organizational settings. Rather, they suggest it would be better to recognize the acute diversity in the individuals, tasks, cultures, technologies, and information practices that exist in organizations today, and to develop models, approaches, and recommendations of information seeking and use that reflect our understanding of this diversity.

The Structure and Dynamics of Organizational Knowledge

This chapter has three objectives. First, we examine the transformation of data to knowledge as the outcome of human enactment that imposes increasing levels of structure on signals and data. Second, we present a typology of organizational knowledge that differentiates between tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, and cultural knowledge. Third, we introduce major theoretical models that attempt to explain the dynamics of creating, diffusing, and using organizational knowledge.

The complexity and value of managing in the digital environment

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together ways of coordinating, evangelizing and adapting in organizations that are more connected digitally than physically. The digital environment is both a management blessing and a burden. The panelists offer varying viewpoints and perspectives into our expanding digital world. The panel session will begin with a brief description of the panels overall theme and its relevance and importance to the broader ASIST community. This will set the stage and provide context to the three individual panelist presentations. Each panelist will situate his or her talk in context to the overall theme and will elicit key insights and recommendations pertaining to this theme. This should provide a powerful mechanism to engage conversation and the sharing of ideas between panel members and audience participants. This session reflects the interests of SIG-MGT membership and aligns with the ASIST 2007 theme of “Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science”

Knowledge management practices in organizations undergoing fundamental change

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together the information-related issues of organizational change, managing knowledge, enabling technology and the role of senior management. This session reflects the interests of SIG-MGT membership and aligns with the ASIST 2005 theme of “Bringing Research and Practice Together.”

Understanding Organizational Web Use

This chapter presents findings from a recent investigation by the authors of how knowledge workers in organizations utilize the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work (Choo, Detlor, & Turnbull, 2000). Though other studies of Web use presented in the last chapter cover a broad range of Web users, most Web usage studies tend to concentrate on students and home users (Kehoe, Pitkow & Rogers, 1998). In contrast, the study presented here focuses exclusively on corporate Web users who utilize the Web as an integral part of their daily work. All participants in our study used the Web to carry out various work-related activities and were connected to the Internet through continuous leased-line access and relatively high-powered machines. The purpose of our research was to focus on these “work-oriented” Web users in the hope that we would be able to understand and predict trends and patterns in organizational Web use.