Design and evaluation of awareness mechanisms in CiteSeer

Awareness has been extensively studied in human computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). The success of many collaborative systems hinges on effectively supporting awareness of different collaborators, their actions, and the process of creating shared work products. As digital libraries are increasingly becoming more than just repositories for information search and retrieval – essentially fostering collaboration among its community of users – awareness remains an unexplored research area in this domain. We are investigating awareness mechanisms in CiteSeer, a scholarly digital library for the computer and information science domain. CiteSeer users can be notified of new publication events (e.g., publication of a paper that cites one of their papers) using feeds as notification systems. We present three cumulative user studies – requirements elicitation, prototype evaluation, and naturalistic study – in the context of supporting CiteSeer feeds. Our results indicate that users prefer feeds that place target items in query-relevant contexts, and that preferred context varies with type of publication event. We found that users integrated feeds as part of their broader, everyday activities and used them as planning tools to collaborate with others.