Information seeking (or searching)

"Information seeking has been understood as a process in which the actor's understanding of his or her tasks or problems, information needs, relevance criteria, and the available information space evolve."  (Järvelin & Ingwersen, 2004).

 

Information seeking is broader than literature searching  and information retrieval. The last mentioned concept is mainly used for searching electronic databases, although it may also be used about searching other systems of organized knowledge (to retrieve means to find again implying that something has first been stored).

 

Information seeking includes many forms of behavior such as browsing, observing, using informal information sources, reading, studying, searching formal information sources, subscribing to mass media and much more. Searching behavior is not limited to human beings, but is also studied by biologists in different species (cf., Bell, 1991).

 

Information seeking is an extremely broad term, much broader than Library and Information Science (LIS). For LIS is the point of departure literature searching because literature is what libraries and bibliographic databases are mainly about. (Even so-called fact retrieval sources may be seen as forms of literature).

 

Tom Wilson makes a distinction between seeking and searching and finds that “the various areas of research within the general area of information behaviour may be seen as a series of nested fields” (Wilson, 1999, p. 262-263):

 

To guide people searching literature is an important task for LIS. This is essential in user education and training. Bibliographical guides are developed to help fulfill this task. Studies of literature searching may be more less descriptive, theoretical or normative. In the library tradition there have been a tendency to provide normative guidelines for both indexing and searching at the expense of research studies. Among the publications about literature searching are: Cooper (1985), Hjørland (1986/1988), White (1994) and Wilson (1992).

 

Why has information seeking become a popular term in LIS at the expense of literature searching? One very popular researcher in information seeking was Elfreda A. Chatman (†2002). A summary of her book The Information World of Retired Women (1992) is "Using profiles of women living in a retirement community, the information and social worlds of elderly women are explored in an attempt to discover the effects of ageing on their help-seeking behaviour. The relationships between this behaviour and information policy is also discussed."

 

Within research in artificial Intelligence is the concept of search also important. There are here two kinds of searches: Algorithmic searches and heuristics searches. An example of a search algorithm is "Brute-Force Search" (which do not require domain specific knowledge). Subcategories are "Breath-First Search", "Depth-First Search", "Depth-First Iterative-Deepening" and "Bidirectional Search". Examples of algorithms using heuristic evaluations are "Hill-Climbing", "Best-First Search", "A*" and "Interactive Deepening-A*" (see Korf, 1987).

Krauthammer et al. (2002) writes that it is often assumed that the correct molecular interactions are known or can be identified by reading a few research articles. However, this assumption does not necessarily hold, as truth is rather an emerging property based on many potentially conflicting facts.

 

Buzikashvili (2005) considers different types of model and real-life information searching behavior. Only two behavioral principles correspond to all the diversity of information searching: the principle of least effort describing a model unmediated search and the principle of guarantied results describing a model mediated search. It is shown that real-life searching follows the same principles and that the principle of least effort describes not only unmediated search but also team and pseudo-mediated searches. To explain information searching behavior the coverage space is considered. This model explains both choice of the principle and non-monotonicity of this choice. As an application of these results, the universally accepted myth about differences between searching on the Web and searching in traditional IR systems is reevaluated.

 

Before you can successfully search for information you must understand how information is created and organized in society. 

http://lib.northern.edu/infolit/tablesversion/lessons/lesson1/production.htm 

 

 

Literature:

 

Bell, W. J. (1991). Searching behavior: The behavioral ecology of finding resources. New York: Chapman & Hall.

 

Buzikashvili, N. E. (2005). Information Searching Behavior: Between Two Principles. 5th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, CoLIS 2005, Glasgow, UK, June 4-8, 2005. Berlin: Springer. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3507).

 

Chatman, E. A. (1992). The Information World of Retired Women. Westport & London: Greenwood Press. (New directions in information management. no. 29).
 

Chen, C.-C. & Hernon, P. (1982). Information Seeking: Assessing and anticipating user needs. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers.

 

Cooper, H. (1985). Literature searching strategies of integrative research reviewers. American Psychologist, 40, 1267-1269.
 

Hjørland, B. (1986). Litteratursøgning i forskning. SAML. Skrifter om Anvendt og Matematisk Lingvistik, 12, 79-102. Click for full-text PDF (For translation to English see Hjørland, 1988).

 

Hjørland, B. (1988). Information Retrieval in Psychology. Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, 6(3/4), 39‑64. Click for full-text IR in psychol_1988.PDF (English translation of Hjørland, 1986).

 

Hjørland, B. (1993). Videnskab, disciplin & fag som ramme for informationssøgning. (146-171 IN: Emnerepræsentation og informationssøgning. Bidrag til en teori på kundskabsteoretisk grundlag. Göteborg: Valfrid. Publiceringsföreningen för inst Bibliotekshögskolan vid Högskolan i Borås och Centrum för biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap vid Göteborgs universitet).

 

Hjørland, B. (1998). Officiel opposition ved Louise Limbergs disputation 20.Marts 1998 på Göteborgs Universitet [Titel: "At söka information för att lära. En studie av samspel mellan informationssökning och lärande"]. Svensk Biblioteksforskning, 1998(1), side 27-63. Click for full-text .pdf

 

Hjørland, B. (2000). Information Seeking Behavior. What should a general theory look like? Paper presented at the ISIC2000 Conference in Borås 17th August 2000. Published in: The New Review of Information behaviour research: Studies of information seeking in context, Vol. 1 (London: Taylor Graham. ISSN: 1471-6313), pp. 19-33.

 

Hjørland, B. & Nicolaisen, J. (2005). Epistemologies as (normative) theories of information seeking and use. Oral presentation for the session on Information Seeking Behavior in Epistemological Light at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Charlotte, NC (November 1., 2005). Word file http://www.db.dk/jni/lifeboat/Speech.doc

 

 

Järvelin, K. & Ingwersen, P. (2004). Information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology.   Information Research, 10(1) paper 212. Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/10-1/paper212.html

 

Krauthammer, M.; Kra, P.; Iossifov, I.; Gomez, S. M.; Hripcsak G.; Hatzivassiloglou, V.; Friedman, C. & Rzhetsky, A. (2002). Of truth and pathways: chasing bits of information through myriads of articles. Bioinformatics, 18 Suppl 1:S, 249–S257.

 

Korf, R. E. (1987). Search (in: Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 2. Ed. by S. C. Shapiro et al. New York: John Wiley & Sons), 994-998.
 

Saracevic, T. et al. (1988). A Study of Information Seeking and Retrieving I-III. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 39(3), 161-176; 177-196 & 197-216.

 

White, H. (1994). Scientific communication and literature retrieval. In H. Cooper & L. V. Hedges (Eds.), The handbook of research synthesis, 41--56. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
 

Wilson, P. (1992). Searching: Strategies and evaluation. In H. D. White, M. J. Bates, and P. Wilson, For information specialists: Interpretations of reference and bibliographic work, 153--181. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

 

Wilson, T. (1999). Models in information behaviour research. Journal of Documentation, 55(3), 249-270.


 

See also:  Information; Information literacy; Information retrieval; Information search strategy; Literature searching; Research processes, information seeking in";
 

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 19-03-2007

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To be edited:

Information Begrebet informationssøgning anvendes i forskellige betydninger, der bl.a. hænger sammen med uklarhed omkring begrebet *"information". Nogle gange anvendes det som *"fact retrieval" i modsætning til dokument­søgning (*"infor­mation retrieval"; "IR"). Denne begrebsbrug vil vi ikke anbefale (jfr. *information). Informations­søgning dækker såvel litteratur­søgning som søgning efter konkrete oplysninger og viden i ikke-dokumenteret form, herunder såvel emnesøgning som "non-subject search" (Jfr. *emnesøgning).

Begrebet dækker såvel *manuel- som auto­mati­seret søg­ning, hvor­imod beteg­nelsen "infor­mation retrieval" har en konnotation i retning af automatiseret søgning eller søgning i elektroniske medier. I dette leksikon vil vi forsøge at foretage en sondering mellem de problemer, der er mere umiddelbart knyttet til tekniske og formelle aspekter i "IR" og de problemer vedr. f.eks. forskeres brug af *kilder, der mere går på søgningens indholdsmæssige, kvalitative, forsknings­metodologiske side. Vi opfatter begrebet informationssøgning som bredere og mere overordnet in IR, men nogen skarp grænse eller konsekvens vil ikke blive trukket. Informationssøgning forudsætter først og fremmest kendskab til *informationsstrukturer, *videns­domæner, fagsprog o.lign. Bogen "Information Seeking" (Chen & Hernon, 1982) er et typisk eksempel på en bog om infor­mationssøgning, der kan adskilles fra den snævrere litteratur om *"information retrieval", der f.eks. er repræsenteret ved forfattere som Cleverdon, Salton, Spark Jones og Lancaster.

Informationssøgning - og muligheden for at optimere denne ved *dokument­beskri­vel­se, *vidensrepræsentation, *"IR-sprog" o.s.v. udgør *informationsvidenskabens nøgleproblem.

Nogle gange konstruerer bibliotekarer søgediagrammer, der rummer normative an­visninger på, hvorledes informationssøgning skal foretages (Se nærmere under *algoritme).


 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 19-03-2007

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