Designing Search Tasks for Archive Search
This work addresses the need for better tools to analyze search behavior in archives like legal or newspaper collections, but it is incremental as it builds on existing temporal search systems.
The authors tackled the problem of understanding user search behavior in longitudinal archives by proposing a set of search tasks with varying complexity for researchers to study this behavior, and their initial findings show the viability of these tasks for such investigations.
Longitudinal corpora like legal, corporate and newspaper archives are of immense value to a variety of users, and time as an important factor strongly influences their search behavior in these archives. While many systems have been developed to support users temporal information needs, questions remain over how users utilize these advances to satisfy their needs. Analyzing their search behavior will provide us with novel insights into search strategy, guide better interface and system design and highlight new problems for further research. In this paper we propose a set of search tasks, with varying complexity, that IIR researchers can utilize to study user search behavior in archives. We discuss how we created and refined these tasks as the result of a pilot study using a temporal search engine. We not only propose task descriptions but also pre and post-task evaluation mechanisms that can be employed for a large-scale study (crowdsourcing). Our initial findings show the viability of such tasks for investigating search behavior in archives.