Investigating Features in Support of Web Tools for Information Gathering

This paper presents a study that investigated three features to improve how users perform information gathering tasks on the web. These features were based on recommendations that were developed in a previous work. The results of the previous study indicated that tools supporting information gathering could be improved by: 1) keeping track of references to information as it is gathered for the task 2) keeping the task information integrated between sessions, and 3) providing integrated search, browsing, and editing capabilities. The results of the study described in this paper using a prototype indicate that these features improve performance.