Abstract Objective - To explore the prevalence of systematic reviews (SRs) and librarians’ involvement in them, and to investigate whether librarian co-authorship of SRs was associated with lower risk of bias. Methods - SRs by researchers at University of Oslo or Oslo University Hospital were counted and categorized by extent of librarian involvement and assessed for risk of bias using the tool Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews (ROBIS). Results - Of 2,737 identified reviews, 324 (11.84%) were SRs as defined by the review authors. Of the 324 SRs, 4 (1.23%) had librarian co-authors, in 85 (26.23%) librarians were acknowledged or mentioned in the methods section. In the remaining 235 SRs (72.53%), there was no clear evidence that a librarian had been involved. Librarian co-authored SRs were associated with lower risk of bias compared to SRs with acknowledgement or no participation by librarians. Conclusion - SRs constitute a small portion of published reviews. Librarians rarely co-author SRs and are only acknowledged or mentioned in a quarter of our sample. The quality and documentation of literature searches in SRs remains a challenge. To minimise the risk of bias in SRs, librarians should advocate for co-authorship.

Models of information seeking, including Kuhlthau's InformationSearch Process model, describe fundamentally different macro-level stages. Current search systems usually do not provide support for these stages, but provide a static set of features predominantly focused on supporting micro-level search interactions. This paper investigates the utility of search user interface (SUI) features at different macro-level stages of complex tasks. A user study was designed, using simulated work tasks, to explicitly place users within different stages of a complex task: pre-focus, focus, and post-focus. Active use, passive use and perceived usefulness of features were analysed in order to derive when search features are most useful. Our results identify significant differences in the utility of SUI features between each stage. Specifically, we have observed that informational features are naturally useful in every stage, while input, control features decline in usefulness after the pre-focus stage, and personalisable features become more useful after the pre-focus stage. From these findings, we conclude that features less commonly found in web search interfaces can provide value for users, without cluttering simple searches, when provided at the right times.

The Social Book Search (SBS) Lab investigates book search in scenarios where users search with more than just a query, and look for more than objective metadata. Real-world information needs are generally complex, yet almost all research focuses instead on either relatively simple search based on queries or recommendation based on profiles. The goal is to research and develop techniques to support users in complex book search tasks. The SBS Lab has two tracks. The aim of the Suggestion Track is to develop test collections for evaluating ranking effectiveness of book retrieval and recommender systems. The aim of the Interactive Track is to develop user interfaces that support users through each stage during complex search tasks and to investigate how users exploit professional metadata and user-generated content.

The field of web archiving is at a turning point. In the early years of web archiving, the single URL has been the dominant unit for preservation and access. Access tools such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine reflect this notion as they allowed consultation, or browsing, of one URL at a time. In recent years, however, the single URL approach to accessing web archives is being gradually replaced by search interfaces. This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological implications of the transition to search on web archive research. It introduces ‘search as research’ methods, practices already applied in studies of the live web, which can be repurposed and implemented for critically studying archived web data. Such methods open up a variety of analytical practices that were so far precluded by the single URL entry point to the web archive, such as the re-assemblage of existing collections around a theme or an event, the study of archival artefacts and scaling the unit of analysis from the single URL to the full archive, by generating aggregate views and summaries. The paper introduces examples to ‘search as research’ scenarios, which have been developed by the WebART project at the University of Amsterdam and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, in collaboration with the National Library of the Netherlands. The paper concludes with a discussion of current and potential limitations of ‘search as research’ methods for studying web archives, and the ways with which they can be overcome in the near future.