WXGB6303
DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Academic Session 2007-2008
Semester 2
March 6, 2008
Instructor: Lleuvelyn A. Cacha
1. At the beginning of the semester, you were assigned to a particular user group (social sciences, humanities and the science and technology). Do a literature search introspecting on the information needs and behavior of the user group you have chosen/assigned. Summarize this literature and contemplate upon various models / theories of users’ information-seeking behavior and establish the validity how they contribute to your understanding of your user group. Add your own ideas how to best serve this group and your library users in general.
Information Use Behavior consists of the physical and mental acts involved in incorporating the information found into the person's existing knowledge base. It may involve, therefore, physical acts such as marking sections in a text to note their importance or significance, as well as mental acts that involve, for example, comparison of new information with existing knowledge.
The origins of human information seeking behavior are found in work on the users of libraries and in readership studies in general. The post-war increase in the amount of scientific literature which was either newly published or recently released from war-time restrictions led, in 1948, to the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference (1948), which marks the beginning of the modern study of human information seeking behavior. However, the subject goes rather further back in time.
T.D. Wilson experience of information seeking in this very practical context led him to develop a model of information seeking behavior that is prompted by the individual’s physiological,cognitive and effective needs (Wilson, 1981). He goes onto note that the context of any one of these needs may be the person him- or herself, or the role demands of the person's work or life, or the environments (political, economic, technological, etc.) within which that life or work takes place. He then suggests that the barriers that impede the search for information will arise out of the same set of contexts. Dervin developed the sense-making approach, which is implemented in terms of four constituent elements - a situation in time and space, which defines the context in which information problems arise; a gap, which identifies the difference between the contextual situation and the desired situation (e.g.uncertainty); an outcome, that is, the consequences of the sense-making
process, and a bridge, that is, some means of closing the gap between situation and outcome (Dervin,1983).These elements are presented in terms of a triangle: situation,gap/bridge, and outcome. Dervin defines her approach not simply as a model or a method but as “…a set of assumptions,a theoretic perspective, a methodological approach, a set of research methods, and a practice.”Ellis employed qualitative interviewing in identifying common characteristics of information behavior of researchers first in the social sciences, then in the physical sciences and,most recently, in engineering. He found that his set of characteristics applied, with some slight expansion in the last study,to all of these disciplines. (Ellis, 1987; Ellis, Cox et al., 1993; Ellis & Haugan, 1997) His characteristics are: Starting: the means employed by the user to begin seeking information, for example, asking some knowledgeable colleague; Chaining: following footnotes and citations in known material or “forward” chaining from known items through citation indexes; Browsing: “semi-directed or semi-structured searching;”Differentiating: using known differences in information sources as a way of filtering the amount of information obtained; Monitoring: keeping up-to-date or current awareness searching; Extracting: selectively identifying relevant material in an information source; Verifying: checking the accuracy of information; Ending: which may be defined as “tying up loose ends”through a final search.
Kuhlthau (1994) evolved a process stage model of information seeking behavior based, initially, on a study of high school students. The stages of the model are Initiation, Selection, Exploration, Formulation, Collection and Presentation and each stage is said to be associated with certain feelings and with specific activities.
Figure 1: a model of information behaviour
Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull in their research Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing (2000), presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or decision making. Each mode of information seeking on the Web is distinguished by the nature of information needs, information seeking tactics, and the purpose of information use. The information seeking tactics characterizing each mode were revealed by recurrent sequences of browser actions initiated by the information seeker. Thus, undirected viewing is characterized by starting and chaining actions; conditioned viewing is characterized by differentiating, browsing, and monitoring actions; informal search is characterized by differentiating and localized extracting; and formal search consisted of systematic, thorough extracting.
They suggests that a behavioral framework that relates motivations (the strategies and reasons for viewing and searching) and moves (the tactics used to find and use information) may be helpful in analyzing Web-based information seeking. The study also suggests that multiple, complementary methods of collecting qualitative and quantitative data may be integrated within a single study to compose a more nuanced portrayal of how individuals seek and use Web-based information in their natural work settings.
Suggestion
From the literature searching on the information needs and behavior, there are some ideas to serve this group in the library users. There are different types of users from different levels. We have to create different links for different users. For example the user is a school students and looking information about history of Malaysia, they can go through to the student tools and choose the history. From here user can view subject in history.
We also tried to create the simple searching technique for user. They won’t key in to much numbers and password or register many times before can be used the library.
Refrence
Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor & Don Turnbull Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching volume 5, number 2
David Ellis, 1989. "A Behavioural Model for Information Retrieval System Design," Journal of Information Science, volume 15, numbers 4/5, pp. 237-247.
T. D. Wilson, 1997. "Information Behaviour: An Interdisciplinary Perspective," Information Processing & Management, volume 33, number 4, pp. 551-572.