Another report on collaborative information seeking

Max L. Wilson and Mathew Wilson wrote this report, “Social Anxieties and Collaborative Information Seeking.”

Anxiety, especially in learning and decision-making, has long been a recognised factor of solitary Information seeking. Collaborative information seeking, however, reintroduces factors of social anxiety into the search process, which were otherwise left behind in the transition between library (social) and online (individual) services. Library Anxiety Theory, for example, emphasized the social inferiority that many novice library users felt. This position paper speculates on the applicability of such social anxiety theories to the information seeking process, as novices begin to search collaboratively with other users.