  The problem of how people find information is studied extensively; however,
the problem of how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they
have found is not as well understood. Recently, several projects have conducted
in-situ studies to explore how people re-find and re-use information. Here, we
present results and observations from a controlled, laboratory study of
refinding information found on the web.
  Our study was conducted as a collaborative exercise with pairs of
participants. One participant acted as a retriever, helping the other
participant re-find information by telephone. This design allowed us to gain
insight into the strategies that users employed to re-find information, and
into how domain artifacts and contextual information were used to aid the
re-finding process. We also introduced the ability for users to add their own
explicitly artifacts in the form of making annotations on the web pages they
viewed.
  We observe that re-finding often occurs as a two stage, iterative process in
which users first attempt to locate an information source (search), and once
found, begin a process to find the specific information being sought (browse).
Our findings are consistent with research on waypoints; orienteering approaches
to re-finding; and navigation of electronic spaces. Furthermore, we observed
that annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added
context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.
