Designing for e-science: Requirements gathering for collaboration in CiteSeer

It is unclear if and how collaboratories have enhanced distributed scientific collaboration. Furthermore, little is known in the way of design strategies to support such collaboration. This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-science in the context of CiteSeer, a search engine and digital library of research literature in the computer and information science disciplines. Based on a survey and follow-up interviews with CiteSeer users, we present four novel implications for designing the CiteSeer collaboratory. First, visualize query-based social networks to identify scholarly communities of interest. Second, provide online collaborative tool support for upstream stages of scientific collaboration. Third, support activity awareness for staying cognizant of online scientific activities. Fourth, use notification systems to convey scientific activity awareness. We discuss how these implications can broadly enhance e-science usability for collaboratory infrastructures based on digital libraries.