Collaborative Information Seeking [Guest editors´ introduction]

People often engage in collaborative information seeking to achieve common goals, enlist expertise, increase the scope of what can be searched, and even simply to help others. In today´s era of increased user-generated content and online sharing, computer and information scientists have a renewed interest in collaborative information seeking as an exciting area of research and development, with applications that range from education to e-commerce, with implications for areas that range from libraries to legal informatics. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/CXnNut7hKsU is a video in which proponents of collaborative information seeking discuss why supporting people´s innate behavior and the need for working together while seeking and using information are important to computer science. Featured speakers include Chirag Shah, Rob Capra, Madhu Reddy, Meredith Ringel Morris, Roberto González-Ibáñez, and Michael B. Twidale.