Affiliations: Information Systems Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ, USA. E-mails: turoff@njit.edu, hiltz@njit.edu
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Prof. Murray Turoff, Information Systems Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, 19 Meadowbrook Rd., Randolph, Newark, NJ 07869, USA. Tel.: +1 973 361 6680; E-mail: turoff@njit.edu.
Abstract: Thirty four professionals who are part of a community of practice in the field of health related emergency response management provided information about the sources of information that they currently use the most, as well as their unmet information needs, and the kinds of information systems tools they would like to have. This professional community relies heavily on the Web, but they report severe information overload, in terms of not easily being able to find the kinds of information they want, amid the deluge of information that is there. In particular, they would find a system that uses social tagging and social recommender system features to be very useful for accessing relevant documents in the “gray literature”. We suggest that services such as these will be increasingly important for professional communities in general.
Keywords: Information overload, emergency management, communities of practice, recommender systems
