LOIS data are collected from voluntary participants that install the LOIS browser extension on their computer and complete a set of pre-defined online search tasks.
What we collect are search stories, that is, enriched navigation logs of what users do when searching information online.
Search story logs are coupled with user profile data and from pre-task and post-task surveys.
The LOIS data collection happened in three waves.
Wave 1 | Testing
The testing wave was aimed at controlling and fine-tuning the LOIS datta collection system took place in Spring 2020 and involved 16 participants.
Wave 2 | The Fake News Experiment (FNX)
Wave 2 was the first larrge data collection and took place in Winter 2020. About 100 users were engaged in checking 6 news items online, trtying to understand if they weer fake or real news. We engaged 181 participants and collected 476 search stories; unfortunately, some were incomplete, due to a technical issue.
Wave 3 | The Main Data Collection (MDC)
The main LOIS data collection took place in Spring 2021 and involved 152 users, to which 6 expert searchers (librarians, journalists and researchers) were added. All worked on 4 search tasks, generating a total of 617 valid search stories.
Wave 4 | The Class Sessions (CS)
The last months of the project were devoted to transform the insights of LOIS into effective secondary school online information search activities. 300+ students and their teachers were engaged in completing online search tasks and then reflect on their search stories to enhance their serach skills. Additional stories were collected at this time.
LOIS data are published with an open licence un OSF >> https://osf.io/62895/
LOIS 