Exploring and Describing Search Expertise

We present work in progress on an exploratory longitudinal study of the search behavior of students as they worked on assignments for a semester-long course on expert search. Our goals were to observe students as they acquired search skills, and to describe behavior associated with the skills learned. Nine MLIS graduate students completed the remote study, providing detailed logs of searches conducted during coursework. In this poster, we focus on assignments completed using Dialog Classic. We briefly review motivations for the study, related work, and our method. We then discuss our analysis approach, and conclude with an example from our data.