User Information Seeking Behavior in a Medical Web Portal Environment: A Preliminary Study

The emergence of information portal systems in the past few years has led to a greatly enhanced Web-based environment for users seeking information online. While considerable research has been conducted on user information- seeking behavior in regular IR environments over the past decade, this paper focuses specifically on how users in a medical science and clinical setting carry out their daily information seeking through a customizable information portal system (MyWelch). We describe our initial study on analyzing Web usage data from My- Welch to see whether the results conform to the features and patterns established in current information-seeking models, present several observations regarding user information- seeking behavior in a portal environment, outline possible long-term user information-seeking patterns based on usage data, and discuss the direction of future research on user information-seeking behavior in the MyWelch portal environment