Information interaction in molecular medicine: integrated use of multiple channels

Task-based information access is a significant context for studying information interaction and for developing information retrieval (IR) systems. Molecular medicine (MM) is an information-intensive and rapidly growing task domain, which aims at providing new approaches to the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of various diseases. The development of bioinformatics databases and tools has led to an extremely distributed information environment. There are numerous generic and domain-specific tools and databases available for online information access. This renders MM as a fruitful context for research in task-based IR. The present paper examines empirically task-based information access in MM and analyzes task processes as contexts of information access and interaction, integrated use of resources in information access and the limitations of (simple server-side) log analysis in understanding information access, retrieval sessions in particular. We shed light on the complexity of the between-systems interaction. The findings suggest that the system development should not be done in isolation as there is considerable interaction between them in real world use. We also classify system-level strategies of information access integration that can be used to reduce the amount of manual system integration by task performers.