Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior (3rd ed.)

I came to this text as a professional librarian reading it to better understand how people seek information and how this could improve services provided.

This highly readable text brings together and places into context the research on information seeking behavior over the last century. Most of the research mentioned is from the last 20 years. Included with the bibliography is a “Recommended for Further Reading” section at the end of each chapter, wherein a useful brief explanation of each resource is given. There is a significant reference list at the end of the text, revealing the wealth of literature in this field.

Reading the whole book one can feel a bit overwhelmed at the depth and breath of research that has been carried out investigating information seeking behavior. It is designed in such a way that it can be read to suit one's own goals and needs from students to researchers.

In the Introduction ten “dubious assumptions” about non‐structured information‐seeking behaviors as identified by Dervin (1976) are listed. In the final chapter Case reinterprets and restates Dervin's “dubious assumptions” into six main points and adds other conclusions. These are:

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  formal sources and rationalized searches reflect only one side of human behavior;

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  more information is not always better;

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  context is central to the transfer of information;

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  sometimes information – particularly generalized packages of information – does not help;

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  sometimes it is not possible to make information available or accessible;

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  information seeking is a dynamic process;

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  information seeking is not always about a “problem” or “problematic situation”; and

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  information seeking is not always about sense‐making either.

Models and theories of information‐seeking behaviors are looked at in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 skillfully brings together over the last two decades nine significant models of information‐seeking behaviors, with a section comparing the nine models (Table 6.1, p, 159).

The information in this book will assist library professionals who are reassessing how to provide information services to their client group to focus their thinking and start asking questions. This book concentrates more on user‐centric seeking behavior than source‐centric usage, reflecting the developments in current research in the field. A lot of information studies in the past concentrated on how people seek information in structured information environment (databases). Easy access to the internet has changed how people seek for information and the book looks at a number of studies on health information seeking behavior. Future research will need to be carried out into how the advent of apps and the rapid uptake of smart phones, tablets, etc, is changing the information seeking behaviors of people, and how much of this behavior will be unstructured non‐directional as compared to structured.

Chapter 5 covers the closely related concepts to information seeking, including decision‐making, browsing, relevance, pertinence, salience, infotainment, misinformation, selective exposure, information overload anxiety, and avoiding information behavior. Infotainment is a term associated with television, but the term could become broader as videos such as the Victorian Department of Just Social Media Policy (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iQLkt5CG8I) are uploaded to YouTube.

This text lends itself to being discussed as it has an Appendix on questions for discussion and application and deserves its own web page for a discussion forum.

Many possible research areas can be explored that arise from reading this text. For example, how do information‐seeking behavior and knowledge management work together? Is non‐task orientated information seeking behavior taken into consideration when using social media within organizational intranets? What is the optimal way to design an organization's (including a library's) website to help non‐task orientated information‐seeking behavior client groups to both seek and find information?