Information seeking in the age of the data deluge
| Pages | 6-10 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-10-2018-0065 |
| Author | Donna Ellen Frederick |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Library & information services |
Information seeking in the age of the data deluge
Donna Ellen Frederick
Over the past two years, the “data
deluge column” has explored numerous
ways in which technological change,
exponential increases in electronically
available data and changes in science and
society have had the impact of creating
new demands and possibilities for how
libraries and librarians provide
information to their users. We understand
that the information environment has
changed significantly over the past two
decades and, as discussed in an earlier
column, will continue to change as the
technologies of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution are increasingly integrated
into everyday life. Given all the change,
readers may also wonder how the manner
in which individuals go about finding
information has changed. This instalment
of the “data deluge column” will examine
the issue of information seeking in the age
of data deluge.
Information seeking, what is it? It is a
term that all librarians have heard or
talked about at some point in their
education, at conferences or in
discussions with other librarians.
Information seeking behaviours are
studied, and papers are written about what
is learned. Interestingly enough, one of
the author’s go-to resources for
definitions of library and information
science terminology, the Online
Dictionary of Library and Information
Science or ODLIS, appears to lack an
entry for “information seeking”. There
does not seem to be any common
variations on the phrase such as
Kuhlthau’s “information search process”.
Only a narrower, related term,
“information retrieval”, has an entry. This
is a strange oversight given the fact that a
single database search of Library and
Information Science Abstracts (LISA)
returns hundreds of thousands of hits for
the keyword “information seeking” while
specifically searching on the indexed
subject “information seeking behaviors”
retrieves thousands of articles. After
scanning through about a dozen of those
articles, the author came to a conclusion
that her long-held understanding of the
concept of “information seeking” jived
with what was presented in the articles
regarding what sorts of behaviours
constitute “information seeking”. In
general, information seeking occurs when
an individual realizes the need to acquire
information to answer a question or solve
a problem and deliberately takes action to
resolve that need. These actions include
many possibilities such as consulting with
friends or an expert on the topic, reading
books, going to the library or doing
generic searching on the World Wide
Web.
A more detailed look at the published
literature on information seeking
behaviours reveals that this is a topic
which has been well-researched over the
past three decades. Specific patterns in
behaviour have been identified as
correlating with certain linguistic, cultural
or other demographic characteristics of
information seekers. Researchers have
identified ways in which both
technological and social changes have
changed user preferences for sources of
information and modes of information
retrieval. All in all, the outcomes of the
research have likely helped librarians
over the years to better understand the
divergent and changing information
needs of their users and make appropriate
adjustments in their library collections
and services. Given the rapid rate of
change in our information environment,
ongoing research in the area of how
people find and retrieve information
should not only remain of interest but
should grow in importance.
Savolainen’s (2018) paper “Pioneering
models for information interaction in the
context of information seeking and
retrieval” provides a discussion of four
early or “pioneering” models of
information seeking and retrieval and
provides what is described as a
“conceptual analysis”. These models
include those formulated by Belkin,
Ingwersen and Ja
¨rvelin. The paper also
traces how the pioneering models were
further developed and elaborated upon and
how they influenced the thought of other
information science theorists. The author
of this column found the explanation and
analysis in the paper to be enlightening
with regard to explaining how models can
create a context for designing research and
interpreting results; she found some of the
incidental conclusions of the research to be
particularly relevant to understanding the
changing nature of information seeking.
For example, undoubtedly, all librarians
have anecdotal examples which support
the conclusion that information seeking in
information retrieval systems can fail
because “there is often a mismatch
between the user’s need and request
because the texts may be inappropriately
represented in the IR system, the need
cannot be expressed appropriately in the
system’s terms, or the need in itself is
unspecifiable at the cognitive level”
(p. 973). Both her public service and
cataloguing experience attests to the
degree to which this is an ongoing and
difficult to resolve problem. This is likely
to become an even greater issue, as library
users become increasingly diverse, while
technological change coupled with the
data deluge allows for the creation of
increasingly large and complex bodies of
informationtosearch.Whatalsostruckthe
author is that even though Savolainen’s
analysis considered some of the newer
revisions to the original models, the
conceptualization of information seeking
remained a user-initiated process which
involves a series of interactions with some
form of an information retrieval system.
Of course, this approach to information
seeking has been in existence since
children began to ask their parents
questions to learn and make sense of the
world around them. Just as certainly,
human beings will query sources of
informationwhentheyneedtolearnor
solve a problem. What remains
unanswered is whether or not, in our new
information age, if the nature of
information seeking itself has changed.
The author returned to the database search
6LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 2 2019, pp. 6-10, V
CEmerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-10-2018-0065
To continue reading
Request your trial