Studies of informal mechanisms of knowledge sharing in corporate settings have greatly increased our understanding of collaboration in the workplace (e.g., Orr, 1986, 1990). For instance, Orr (1986) showed how informal interpersonal interactions in the form of narratives lead individuals to new understandings of work related problems. Ehrlich and Cash (1994) showed that information-finding can be a collaborative activity; specifically, that groups can have an "information mediator" who has such well-developed expertise that others come to that person for help. Nevertheless, most approaches to collaborative information-seeking rely either on explicit recommendations (e.g., Maes, 1994) or on synchronous collaboration (e.g., Moody, in press). By contrast, our approach is to facilitate the use of the distributed expertise within an organization by making available traces of experts' browsing and searching behavior. Relying on users' own knowledge of expertise within their organizations, our system helps users find only those documents that at least one expert in a particular field has already read. Our implementation, the Expertise Browser, stores the information-browsing paths and patterns of content experts, and then uses these to provide hints and help to others who are browsing or searching in similar areas. More precisely, a browse path is the trail of documents opened or any other informational resources used to locate, view, navigate, or create documents, including queries and results. Our system provides three ways to leverage expert browse paths: IIf the user knows a particular person with relevant expertise, the user can explicitly specify that the system should provide access to that person's browse paths that are relevant to the query. IIThe user can ask for the system to identify a ranked list of those with knowledge that appears relevant to current information needs and proceed as in (1). IIIThe user can ask the system to return browse paths of all experts relevant to a specific query, Andrew L Cohen Lotus Research Lotus Development Corporation 55 Cambridge Parkway Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617-693-0851 Fax: 617-693-1407 Email: alcohen@lotus.com Paul P. Maglio and Rob Barrett IBM Almaden Research Center 650 Harry Rd, NWED-B2 San Jose, CA 95120 Tel: 408-927-2857 Fax: 408-927-2857 Email: {pmaglio,barrett}@almaden.ibm.com The Expertise Browser: How to Leverage Distributed Organizational Knowledge