INL 230 themes 5-7

Theme 5
Information seeking

• Information seeking: The process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both

human and technological contexts (more human-centered)
• WHEREAS
• Information seeking is related to, but different from, information retrieval (IR) (technology-
centered)
• Information seeking behaviour is due to the specific information needs and knowledge
gaps within an individual in a specific context.
• To fulfill these gaps, each individual must pay more attention to their insufficient
knowledge and try to find the relevant information to meet their information needs.
• In general, information seeking behaviour could be defined as: “a behaviour which
comprises of information needs as well as information search, selection and use of
information relevant to the identified needs”
Information needs:

• Need comes before seek, seek comes before retrieve

• ‘Information Need’ which is an intermediary between ‘information behaviour and
information seeking’ because ‘need’ is a behaviour and ‘seeking’ happens only when
there is a ‘need’ and is followed by searching for information incidentally when in need
(Reddy, Krishnamurt, & Asundi, 2018)
• Information seeking behaviour includes information needs, the use of information
sources to retrieve Information and ends with the use of the retrieved information
• As a broad term it comprises of a set of actions such as information needs identification,
searching for information, selecting information and using the retrieved information to
satisfy the information needs identified earlier
• Bates (2002) Model of information seeking behaviour

Different seeking in different contexts

• The information seeking behaviour activities executed by someone in a working
environment are based on the determination of their information needs, searching and
using the needed information
• But the methods chosen by students is slightly different: often is to find and use
information activities that include searching for information based on their needs to
complete assignments, prepare for group discussions and write a research paper
• Therefore, information seeking behaviour for students involves the process of identifying
information needs, finding, selecting, evaluating and using the retrieved information
• Different context – different behaviour
To understand context better - three contexts - ( based on, and adapted from Wilson
(1997)
1. Environment
-Socio-economic
-Geographical/physical
-Online
-Hybrid
2. Personal
-Emotional
-Educational
-Demographic
3. Social/interpersonal - (social connection)
The environment of the information user

• “Physical space is often seen as the context for information behaviour……Context is

indeed often seen as the setting, environment or background to the subject of interest,
the information behaviour” (Cox 2021: 2).
• Environment of work: Occupational context:
• The occupational context includes working environments
• This may refer to the task performance of the information user
• Think about: What type of information services and systems would you expect to find in
organisations?
• Think of environment as a THIRD PLACE
• Third places is the social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments
of; home ("first place")
• workplace ("second place")
• Third place: Examples of third places include churches, internet cafes, clubs, libraries
and information centers, bookstores
• Co-sharing, co-seeking: “Third space, may be considered as a fertile environment in
which actors and participants can relate, understand and combine diverse knowledges
into new insights and paths for action and thinking” (Muller and Druin, 2012).
Third places, information grounds, information gathering (Cox, 2021)

• Term third place - first coined by Ray Oldenburg

• Gibson and Kaplan (2017) in Cox (2021:3) identify typical zones of information seeking
in terms:
• Distance ( home, local, regional, and long distance)
• Distinct from a base, within which different social groups seek for different types of
information
• Information theory that relates the characteristics of place to information behaviour is the
notion of information grounds
• Physical and social features of certain types of place where information flows particularly
freely
• Third places as locations/environments with characteristics different from home or work
• Places that make them a good context for information gathering, such as their
accessibility and unpretentious appearance
The information user in a personal context

• Personal:
1. Emotional
2. Educational
3. Demographic
• Person/user-in-context: the user as information actor
• The context of the information user could also be seen as defined in relation to a
specific information actor, as person-in-context.
• The information user is influenced and can influence their context
• The two must be seen as interwoven
• In this case, context is not something that describes a place but what the user does -
action
• Action is informed by needs
• Passive or actively seeking information
• Intended or unintended
The personal context includes biological and hereditary factors
1. Age
2. Personality factors: motivation, interests, attitude to information use
3. Information skills (information literacy, digital literacy, metaliteracy and
metacognition)
4. Receptivity
User as actor in a situation must make choices based on needs

• Rational choice theory : does not specify that all individuals work toward (or even desire)
similar goals, nor do they assess costs and benefits similarly.
• Rather, actors assess “costs” and “benefits” according to their own “preferences, values
or utilities”
• In other words, individuals “act with the express purpose of attaining ends that are
consistent with their hierarchy of preferences”
• Rational choice theory has been adopted by several fields including anthropology,
political science, psychology, consumer behaviourism, and sociology
The information user in a social / interpersonal context:

• (social connection) includes cultural, economic, political and technological factors

• Information grounds (Fisher, 1990, 2007): An Information Ground is an environment
temporarily created when people come together for a singular purpose but from whose
behavior emerges a social atmosphere that fosters the spontaneous and serendipitous
sharing of information
Knowledge and information places and spaces in context:

• The knowledge and information context includes the knowledge and information
processes:
1. Knowledge generation
2. Knowledge and information transfer
3. Information utilisation
4. Information poverty
• Factors such as accessibility of information, record content, form of presentation and the
way information is sought and transferred
The difference between third place and third space

• Third Space (Bhabha, 1994) can be explained in terms of some of the complexity of
poverty, social exclusion
• Bonds of affinity (education, user groups, social status, family, location, neighbourhood,
etc.) can function as "poverty traps“: think of digital exclusion and information poverty in
Africa
• Hybridity suggests that every person is a hybrid of their unique set of identity factors to
make choices
• Conditions and locations of social and cultural exclusion have their reflection in symbolic
conditions and locations of cultural exchange and exchange of information
Information user typology:

• Typologies are frameworks that describe different types of users at great detail
• The typology provides user experience information
• We study user typology so that we, as information providers, will be able to plan and
design sources and services to satisfy identified needs and potential and unidentified
needs
• User typology – in simple terms “types of information users
Why is typology analysis important to information providers?

• User typology is explored and researched to assist and enable information providers,
services and system designers to understand their users and their needs
• Helps with addressing needs to satisfaction
• Assists to identify needs and potential and unidentified needs
• User satisfaction is a measurement and indicator of success
• Typology assists in classifying and profiling groups of users
• It can also assist the information provider information to improve usability of the services
How does this information assist the information provider or managers of this
information center?

• Identify needs
• Manage information collections
• Plan and accommodate for the user behaviour
• Gauge user satisfaction
• Ensure that the right information gets to the right users at the right time
• Planning and budgeting of services
How is information to classify users obtained?

• Observations
• Surveys
• Usage statistics and reports
• Software – user acceptance testing
• Data mining
• Reference interview
• Profiling
Typology analysis

• A strategy for descriptive qualitative (or quantitative) data analysis whose goal is the
development of a set of related but distinct categories within a phenomenon that
discriminate across the phenomenon
Information needs and user groups:

• User characteristics in groups:

Users are generally individuals
When planning and designing services and systems, it is useful to classify groups of
users
In information facility and services, at least different types of users can be distinguished
1. Actual information user
2. Potential information user
• A user group is a set of people who have similar interests, goals or concerns
• The members have regular meetings where they can share their ideas
• Online user groups have members distributed throughout the world -meet using
internet chat rooms, on social media and message boards, or mailing lists
• User groups often have websites or blogs that each member can visit on a regular
basis to stay informed
User behaviour and needs

• Users often tend to classify their wants/ interests into fragmented lists
• Their true needs may only be identified from a greater understanding of the user as a
person
• The focus must be placed on the basic needs of the individual as person rather than
merely on the 'enquiry’
Information needs and wants:

• Expressed needs
• Unexpressed needs
• Group needs vs individual needs
• We find groups of users in physical groups, online groups, and hybrid groups
• We could also find groups in augmented reality settings
Groups are created based on Information needs and wants:
Information users@ work:

• Academic institutions
• Research organisations
• Industry
• Government
• Professional associations
• Trade unions and political parties
• The press and broadcasting industry
• Groups in the world of work:
• Information use in occupational roles
-Management and commerce
-Clergy, social counsellors, artists and professional writers
-Engineers, scientists, teachers, nurses, medical practitioners and lawyers
-Clerks, salespersons and service industry workers
-Artisans, operators and unskilled labourers
-Adult groups outside the labour market
-Researchers, college or university students and high-school pupils
-Information users in terms of function and work environment
The classification of information users in terms of their role and function and work
environment
Online user groups and networking

Social networking sites (SNS):

• Came about because of Web 2.0

• Users in the offline world to stay connected regardless of geographical distance,
difference in time, or other context-specific barriers
• They are spaces of socialization for common communities, communities in practice, or
those united by a shared interest
• They have gained global popularity as a medium through which people transmit,
coordinate, and, in some cases, live their lives
• Participatory, dialogical, and user-content fed
• Examples MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are dissemination portals
• Specialist groups of shared interest
Classifying user groups on social media (Grundemann & Burghhardt, 2020) :
 • User groups that are classified according to their communication role are formed by a
relationship between the type of user participation and the position in the information
propagation (Grundemann & Burghhardt, 2020)
Online information seeking

• Searching the web is an interactive procedure between end user and web-based
search tools to achieve a goal – satisfy an information need
• A successful search is when the required information exists on the web, the
employed search tool is able to locate it and the user applies the search tool
optimally
• If one or more elements do not work properly users are not able to locate what they
are looking for
• Users seek information until they have what they were looking for
• The theory of satisficing is explained by cognitive heuristic, behavioral science, and
neuropsychology
• Its application is found in several fields, including economics, artificial intelligence,
and sociology
Satisficing as a result of information seeking

• Satisficing implies that an information seeker and user, when confronted with an overload of
choices for a specific need, will select a product or service that is "good enough," rather than
expending effort and resources on finding the best possible or optimal choice
Profiling information users

• User profiling can be defined as the process of identifying the data about a user’s
information usage and research interest domain
• From this collected data a profile is compiled
• A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user
• It can be defined as the explicit physical of digital representation of the identity and context
of the user, in this case in their quest for information
• The user profile helps in associating characteristics with a user and helps in ascertaining the
interactive behavior of the user along with preferences and information needs
Types of user profiles (Kanoje, Girase, Mukhopadhyay, 2014):

• Explicit – static profiling – usage data, reports

• Implicit – dynamic process – behavioural profiling – future needs
• Hybrid profiling – combination – more accurate and temporal
Steps to follow in a reference interview, towards compiling a user profile (adapted
from ALA guidelines)
The five main areas to the reference interview are:

• Prepare and research if possible

• Be approachability – cordial, eye contact
• Show interest
• Listening attentively /Inquiring
• Searching
• Follow Up
• Create a user profile
• Update the user profile regularly
• Respect confidentiality and privacy
• Be objective and do not make value judgments
Refining the interview:
Uses closed and/or clarifying questions to refine the search query Some examples of
clarifying questions are:

• What have you already found?

• What type of information do you need (books, articles, etc.)?

• Do you need current or historical information?

Manual and remote reference interview

• It is not always possible to do the reference interview face to face

• Remote reference interview can be done by telephone, email, chat, Zoom or other online
meeting platform

• Be aware that traditional visual and non-verbal cues do not exist, and you may have to
ask additional questions
Profiles for personalised information access

• The amount of information available online is increasing exponentially

• While this information is a valuable resource, its sheer volume limits its value
• These applications all need to gather, and exploit, some information about individuals in
order to be effective
• This area is broadly called user profiling.
• Explicit information techniques are contrasted with implicitly collected user information
using browser caches, proxy servers, browser agents, desktop agents, and search logs
• We discuss in detail user profiles represented as weighted keywords, semantic networks,
and weighted concepts
• Profiling in information systems:
 -This information can be used by the system to understand more about user and this
knowledge can be further used for enhancing the retrieval for providing satisfaction to the
user
-User profiling has two important aspects as efficiently knowing user and based on those
recommending items of his interest
-User Profiling is used in alerting services as well as recommenders and services
• User profiling in general started with the just information retrieval and collection of the
user’s information
• Older systems were more concerned about getting data directly from the users that is the
system was explicitly asking the users about the data which is needed
• the user is never interested in directly giving the input
• Research is more focused on profiling user’s data implicitly based on some actions
performed by the user, it may also be referred as behavioral user profiling
Data mining vs data profiling:

• Firstly, data mining has been in use for quite some time, whereas data profiling is a
relatively rare and new topic
• Data mining mines actionable information while making use of sophisticated
mathematical algorithms, whereas data profiling derives information about data quality to
discover anomalies in the dataset.