  One of the key components of designing usable and useful collaborative
information retrieval systems is to understand the needs of the users of these
systems. Our research team has been exploring collaborative information
behavior in a variety of organizational settings. Our research goals have been
two-fold: First, to develop a conceptual understanding of collaborative
information behavior and second, gather requirements for the design of
collaborative information retrieval systems. In this paper, we present a brief
overview of our fieldwork in a three different organizational settings, discuss
our methodology for collecting data on collaborative information behavior, and
highlight some lessons that we are learning about potential users of
collaborative information retrieval systems in these domains.
