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Contextualizing Session Resuming Reasons with Tasks Involving Expected Cross-session Searches

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Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity (iConference 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13972))

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Abstract

Cross-session search (XSS) describes situations in which users search for information related to the same task across multiple sessions. While there has been research on XSS, little attention has been paid to users’ motivations for searching multiple sessions in real-life contexts. We conducted a diary study to investigate the reasons that lead people to search across multiple sessions for their own tasks. We applied Lin and Belkin’s [24] MISE theoretical model as a coding framework to analyze users’ open-ended responses about their XSS reasons. We open-coded reasons that the MISE model did not cover. Our findings identified a subset of session-resuming reasons in the MISE model (i.e., spawning, transmuting, unanswered-incomplete, cultivated-updated, and anticipated) as the main reasons that caused people to start a search session in our participants’ real-world searches. We also found six additional session resuming reasons rarely discussed in the context of XSS: exploring more topic aspects, finding inspiration and examples, reviewing the information found earlier, monitoring task progress, completing a search following a scheduled plan, and feeling in the mood/having the energy to search. Our results contextualize and enrich the MISE session resuming reasons by examining them in real-world examples. Our results also illustrate that users’ XSS motivations are multifaceted. These findings have implications for developing assisting tools to support XSS and help design different types of search sessions to study XSS behavior.

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Acknowledgement

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1552587.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Yuan Li & Rob Capra

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  1. Yuan Li
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  2. Rob Capra
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Correspondence to Yuan Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. iSchool Organization, Berlin, Germany

    Isaac Sserwanga

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Anne Goulding

  3. University of Missouri, Chicago, IL, USA

    Heather Moulaison-Sandy

  4. University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Jia Tina Du

  5. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    António Lucas Soares

  6. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Viviane Hessami

  7. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Rebecca D. Frank

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Li, Y., Capra, R. (2023). Contextualizing Session Resuming Reasons with Tasks Involving Expected Cross-session Searches. In: Sserwanga, I., et al. Information for a Better World: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity. iConference 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_32

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