Reddy, M.C., & Spence, P.R. (2008). Collaborative information seeking: A field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team. Information Processing & Management 22(1), 242-255.

This article is part of reading I’m doing to increase my understanding of various aspects of health informatics. The biggest thing I gleaned from this paper is to start thinking about how to incorporate collaborative tools in information-seeking environments. I’m already unhappy that it’s so difficult to find annotation tools you can use for documents you run across on the Web — mostly because I haven’t found one that handles PDFs seamlessly. So what I want is something that integrates into Firefox that lets you highlight and add sticky notes to any kind of document, be it HTML, PDF, PNG, etc. But I haven’t found that yet, and it frustrates me. So that’s one piece. Another would be the ability to “annotate in chat”, so that if you had a shared screen information seeking environment, people could comment on the information-seeking process and perhaps add information that was not available formally. As Reddy & Spence argue, this is extremely prevalent in the patient care environment — a great deal of information seeking there goes on verbally and face-to-face, but how does this transfer to geographically dispersed patient care teams, which are likely to become more common in the future?