INFORMATION NEEDS IN LOCAL AUTHORITY SOCIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENTS: AN INTERIM REPORT ON PROJECT INISS
| Date | 01 April 1977 |
| Published date | 01 April 1977 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026646 |
| Pages | 277-293 |
| Author | T.D. WILSON,D.R. STREATFIELD |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
INFORMATION NEEDS IN LOCAL AUTHORITY
SOCIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENTS:
AN INTERIM REPORT ON PROJECT INISS
T. D. WILSON
and
D. R. STREATFIELD
Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science,
University of Sheffield
Project INISS is the first major investigation of the information needs of
social services staff in this country. This paper describes the origins of the
project, the method employed in the first phase of the study, some of the
findings, and implications for information services in these environments.
PROJECT INISS (a short form to indicate 'Research project on information
needs and information services in local authority social services departments') has
its origins in a research forum organized by the senior author in 1974. The forum,
which was funded by the British Library R.&D. Department, made a number of
recommendations including:
. . . the themes which should be given priority were . . . 1. The group of
studies on the present state of information exchange in social welfare, including
case-studies of social services departments, their channels of communication,
the information-seeking behaviour of practitioners and the dissemination of
research findings to them ...1
Following the forum a research proposal on this general theme was prepared
and submitted to the British Library R. & D. Department, and the resulting pro-
ject began on 1 October 1975.
The aims of Project INISS, as stated in the proposal, were:
(a) to discover the present information needs, information-seeking behaviour,
and information-use behaviour of social workers and social administrators
in the context of their work, in order to determine what kinds of informa-
tion service might be most effective;
(b) to determine how information is currently sought and disseminated within
Social Services Departments;
(c) to find out who is providing information services at present and what are
the relationships between different organizations and groups;
(d) to test the value of information officers in non-research situations;
(e) on the basis of the above, to establish what needs to be done and what can
be done, with some evaluated experimental provision of services.
To accomplish these aims a three-stage project was proposed and, initially,
funding was sought for the first two stages which would cover aims (a) to (c)
above.
The three stages of the proposal were set in an 'action research' framework
which has been defined as:
Journal
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Vol. 33, No. 4, December 1977, pp. 277-293
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. . . the process of systematically collecting research data about an ongoing
system relative to some objective, goal, or need of that system; feeding these
data back into the system; taking actions by altering selected variables within
the system based both on the data and on hypotheses; and evaluating the
results of actions by collecting more data.2
The aim of proposing an action research mode was based on the senior author's
belief that much information-behaviour research had proved to be sterile and
unimaginative partly because the researchers had no brief to apply or test in
practice the results of their research. The action research mode establishes at the
outset of the research the idea that the data collection and analysis phases should
result in ideas leading to testable innovations in information service organization
and information system delivery.
Apart from the action research orientation Project INISS was based upon two
further propositions:
(1) that in public service agencies information behaviour is part of the total
process of organizational communication and the corollary that the investigation
of information behaviour
is
best carried out from the standpoint of previous work
on communication in organizations. Virtually
all
previous studies of information
needs or information use (with some exceptions such as Tom Allen's work3 and
locally based investigations of management information needs relative to com-
puterized management information systems4) have been conducted from what
is essentially a librarian's point of
view.
That is, answers have been sought to
questions on matters such as journals bought and read, frequency of reading,
relative importance of journals, books, reports, microforms, etc., and extent of
use of secondary services. What little work had been done in the field of social
services was reported in a sub-report of the INFROSS project and only six of the
28 subjects questioned in group interviews could be said to be 'core' social
workers in the post-Seebohm sense. One of the conclusions of this report was
that the librarian's traditional solutions to low information use (persuasion to
read more, training in information searching, and a new abstracting service)
would have little or no success in relation to this particular group. On the use of
information officers the report comments:
One superficially attractive solution would be a personalized information
service, supplied by an information officer attached to a local authority. It is
unlikely that such a person could be afforded by any but the largest local
authorities. If such posts were created, a new indexing and abstracting service
might be a practical possibility, since it could then be aimed at the information
officer rather than direct at social workers; the information officer would do
the social workers' searching for them.5
The report also comments elsewhere on the possible provision of an information
service from the public library and on the use of more information specialists by
the professional institutions.
However, in this report and in the few papers that exist on this topic by other
writers a very limited conception of the role of the information officer is held:
that is, a role bounded by the organization of and dissemination of information
from externally generated documents and by searching 'the literature' on behalf
of social workers. It will be suggested at greater length in our final report that in
public service bureaucracies the information scientist must define for himself (or
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