People spend an enormous amount of time searching for complex information online; for example, consumers researching new purchases or patients learning about their conditions. As they search, people build up rich mental schemas about their target domains; which, if effectively shared, could accelerate learning for others with similar interests. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for integrating the schemas individuals develop as they gather information online and surfacing them for others with similar interests. Through a controlled experiment we show that having access to others' schemas while foraging for information helps new users to induce more useful, prototypical, and better-structured schemas than gathering information alone.

People spend an enormous amount of time searching for and saving information online. Existing tools capture only a small portion of the cognitive processing a user engages in while making sense of a new domain. In this paper we introduce a novel interface for capturing online information in a structured but lightweight way. We use this interface as a platform to experimentally characterize the costs and benefits of structuring information during the sensemaking process. Our results contribute empirical knowledge relevant to theories of information seeking and sensemaking, and practical implications for the development of tools to capture and share online information.