Collaborative information seeking for Desing Engineering

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Investigating Collaborative Information Seeking Practice of Design

Engineering Students

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• Overview

• What’s information seeking?

• The need to study information seeking in a collaborative setting

• What are the skills that students in a design engineering course are expected to have or to acquire?

• The use of concept/mind map tools as a potential solution

• The role of librarians

Agenda

Engineering & Science Library

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• Design engineering projects are commonly collaborative.

• The identification of the needed information is an essential competency?

• Google generation and the information overload

Overview


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• Information seeking behaviour is the area where we can study how people need, seek, give, and use information in different contexts, including the workplace and everyday living.

• There is no single definition for information seeking behaviour as it depends on the discipline where it is studied.

•Foster defines collaborative information seeking as “the study of the systems and practices that enable individuals to collaborate during the seeking, searching and retrieval of information.”

Source: J. Foster, "Collaborative information seeking and retrieval", Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Medford, NJ, 2006, Vol. 40, pp. 329-356.

What is information seeking?


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Kuhlthau’s six stages of the ISP model are:

•Initiation: recognize information need.

•Selection: identify general topic.

•Exploration: investigate information on general.

•Formulation: formulate focus.

•Collection: gather information pertaining to focus.

•Presentation: complete.

Source: C.C. Kuhlthau, “Inside the search process: seeking meaning from the user’s perspective”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 42, No. 5, 1991, pp. 361–371.

Information seeking process (ISP) model


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Information seeking during the design process (based on the type of resource)

Source: D. Veshosky, "Managing Innovation Information in Engineering and Construction Firms," Journal of Management in Engineering, Vol. 14, 1998, pp. 58-66.

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Ellis and Haugan categorized engineers’ information seeking practice into eight categories :

1. Surveying: the initial search for an overview of the related literature within a subject field.

2. Chaining: following chains of different forms of connection between resources to identify new sources of information.

3. Monitoring: maintaining awareness of development and technologies.

4. Browsing: scanning of primary and secondary resources

5. Distinguishing: ranking information sources according to their relative importance

6. Filtering: using search strategies to make the retrieved information more relevant and precise.

7. Extracting: working through sources to select materials for specific use such as a presentation, a discussion, or a report.

8. Ending: activities involved with finishing the information seeking process at the end of the design project.

Source: D. Ellis and M. Haugan, "Modelling the information seeking patterns of engineers and research scientists in an industrial environment", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 53, 1997, pp. 384-403.

Information seeking behaviour of engineers

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• Collaborative information seeking behaviour is not information sharing.

• Which tools would students use in collaborative information seeking? And how they can learn them?

•Collaborative information behaviour is studied on working groups rather than studying individuals and it includes:

• Identifying needs collaboratively,• Formulating queries collaboratively,• Retrieving information collaboratively, • Communicating about information• Coordinating information retrieval activities.

Collaborative information seeking


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How to investigate collaborative information seeking in a design engineering course?


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Suggested Model


Design knowledge framework

Source: O. Eris and L. Leifer, “Facilitating product development knowledge acquisition: Interaction between the expert and the team”, International Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2003, pp. 142-152.

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Suggested Model with intervention


Design knowledge framework

Based on: O. Eris and L. Leifer, “Facilitating product development knowledge acquisition: Interaction between the expert and the team”, International Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2003, pp. 142-152.

Librarian/ TA /Project Manager

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• Concept/ mind maps

• Engineering portfolios

• Collaborative online tools .. Google docs, Refworks, Facebook !

• Who, How, and When?

Suggested tools


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Example: Rob’s map

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• The purpose of this presentation is to introduce the need to study collaborative information practice in design engineering project with a highlight of the role of librarians and information specialists in studying and mapping the information resources that engineering students would use during the project lifetime.

• “Information is not a pill an individual can swallow in order to become informed, but a plastic substance that can be shaped in many ways. An information user is not a passive information processing system but actively makes sense of the surrounding reality and attached personal meaning to information” *

Source: S.Talja, K. Tuominen, and R. Savolainen, R. ‘Isms’ in information science: Constructivism, collectivism and constructionism. Journal of Documentation, 2005, vol. 61 no. 1, 79-101.

Final thoughts


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Questions and Comments !

Nasser Saleh: [email protected], (613) 533-6846

http://library.queensu.ca/webeng

ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE LIBRARYFACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCE

Collaborative information seeking for Desing Engineering

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