Information behaviour research in dialogue with neighbouring fields

Information behaviour research has affinities with many neighbouring fields of research and practise. At the same time, a steady line of criticism has been directed to its modest impact and lack of meaningful dialogue with adjacent disciplines and the impact of information behaviour research on how people deal with information in various settings, and develop information systems and services. The lack of exchange has become increasingly evident as the term ’information behaviour’ has been adopted in disciplines far beyond the established information field. Besides impact of its results on research and practice in different domains, a livelier exchange can be expected to be enriching for information behaviour research itself. The purpose of the panel is to invite the members of the ISIC community to a discussion on the interfaces of information behaviour research with neighbouring research disciplines and practical domains. The panellists represent information behaviour researchers with an extensive experience of working in and with adjacent domains and bring their expertise to discuss with the audience 1) the relevance of information behaviour research and its findings in other domains, 2) what information behaviour research can learn from neighbouring fields, and 3) how the interdisciplinary dialogue could be promoted and nurtured.Peer Reviewe

Risk and Ambiguity in Information Seeking:Eye Gaze Patterns Reveal Contextual Behavior in Dealing with Uncertainty

Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by repeated steps in the search space vs. exploitation, using the resources encountered. We conjecture that this tradeoff characterizes how a user deals with uncertainty and its two aspects, risk and ambiguity in economic theory. Risk is related to the perceived quality of the actually visited patch of information, and can be reduced by exploiting and understanding the patch to a better extent. Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the opportunity cost of having higher quality patches elsewhere in the search space. The aforementioned tradeoff depends on many attributes, including traits of the user: at the two extreme ends of the spectrum, analytic and wholistic searchers employ entirely different strategies. The former type focuses on exploitation first, interspersed with bouts of exploration, whereas the latter type prefers to explore the search space first and consume later. Based on an eye-tracking study of experts' interactions with novel search interfaces in the biomedical domain, we demonstrate that perceived risk shifts the balance between exploration and exploitation in either type of users, tilting it against vs. in favour of ambiguity minimization. Since the pattern of behaviour in information foraging is quintessentially sequential, risk and ambiguity minimization cannot happen simultaneously, leading to a fundamental limit on how good such a tradeoff can be. This in turn connects information seeking with the emergent field of quantum decision theory.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Conducting information seeking behaviour research in an international, interdisciplinary research project: experiences and reflections

Introduction. We report experiences from an international, interdisciplinary research project, in which we conduct information seeking behaviour studies. We give an overview of how we planned and scheduled the research project, which includes the application of the adapted model by Mason, and further share project challenges and relate them to the research literature. Methods. We share illustrative examples of challenges experienced as being part of an international interdisciplinary project, which we discuss in relation to the research literature on research project management. Analysis. We conduct a conceptual analysis of project challenges in light of the project management research literature. Results. We show how we have planned and scheduled the research infrastructure and share how the test design and study methodology was developed by use of the adopted Mason model. We report experiences from our project reflecting national cultures and geographical challenges, different disciplinary and institutional cultures, time and cost limitations, and budget delegation. Conclusion. We find that project success depends on a solid understanding of the nature of the research project and the work conditions and cultures of project partners. Project planning is essential, and it is necessary to be aware of constraints related to time, costs, and human resources.Peer Reviewe

Auditing the office for learning and teaching resource library

The Australian government Office for Learning and Teaching\u27s (OLT) Resource Library is a key means of disseminating the outcomes from projects funded by itself and its predecessor organisations, the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) and the Carrick Institute. In order to apply the recommendations and resources emanating from these projects, it is vital that educators and other stakeholders are aware of, and effectively able to use, the Resource Library. Based on anecdotal evidence indicating a lack of awareness of the Resource Library and problems with consistently being able to search for and retrieve relevant resources from the database, the OLT commissioned a project to formally evaluate the Library and redesign it to improve access and usability. This paper reports on the project\u27s progress, including the results from a questionnaire completed by 117 higher education stakeholders

Auditing the Office for Learning and Teaching Resource Library

The Australian government Office for Learning and Teaching’s (OLT) Resource Library was a key means of disseminating the outcomes from projects funded by itself and its predecessor organisations, the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) and the Carrick Institute. In order to apply the recommendations and resources emanating from these projects, it is vital that educators and other stakeholders are aware of, and effectively able to use, the Resource Library. Based on anecdotal evidence indicating a lack of awareness of the Resource Library and problems with consistently being able to search for and retrieve relevant resources from the database, the OLT commissioned a project to formally evaluate the Library and redesign it to improve access and usability. This paper reports on the project’s progress, including the results from a questionnaire completed by 117 higher education stakeholders

Digital Humanities in the iSchool

The interdisciplinary field known as digital humanities (DH) is represented in various forms in the teaching and research practiced in iSchools. Building on the work of an iSchools organization committee charged with exploring digital humanities curricula, we present findings from a series of related studies exploring aspects of DH teaching, education, and research in iSchools, often in collaboration with other units and disciplines. Through a survey of iSchool programs and an online DH course registry, we investigate the various education models for DH training found in iSchools, followed by a detailed look at DH courses and curricula, explored through analysis of course syllabi and course descriptions. We take a brief look at collaborative disciplines with which iSchools cooperate on DH research projects or in offering DH education. Next, we explore DH careers through an analysis of relevant job advertisements. Finally, we offer some observations about the management and administrative challenges and opportunities related to offering a new iSchool DH program. Our results provide a snapshot ofthe current state of digital humanities in iSchools which may usefully inform the design and evolution of new DH programs, degrees, and related initiatives

User Behavior during the Book Selection Process

We study user behavior during the stage of the book selection process in which people study the content of a book to decide whether it will be useful for their intended purpose. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic; we report on the accuracy of the participants’ decisions, the extent to which they use the table-of-contents and the index, and the impact of the medium on the book selection process. We discuss barriers to accurate book selection and consider what can be learned, at the applied and theoretical levels, from further study of this activity

The impact of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms on information seeking effectiveness

To what extent do MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms improve search effectiveness of different kinds of users? We observed four different kinds of searchers using an experimental information retrieval (IR) system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. The information needs were a subset of the relatively difficult topics originally created for the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). By experimental design, we used 20 search topics in an IR user experiment to alleviate search topic variability. Effectiveness of retrieval was based on the relevance judgments set provided by TREC. Thirty-two participants searched either using a version of the system in which abstracts and MeSH terms were displayed or another version in which they had to formulate their own terms based only on the display of abstracts. We found that MeSH terms were more useful for domain experts than for search experts in terms of the precision measure, even though domain experts did not perceive that MeSH terms were useful. We speculate that because of the technical topics, only the domain experts had the knowledge to understand and therefore make use of the MeSH terms. The primary contributions of this research are: (1) assessment of relative impact of searchers characteristics of domain knowledge and search training on search effectiveness and (2) design and methodology for assessing the usefulness of controlled vocabulary. The effort to create MeSH terms is worthwhile for domain experts' searches on technical topics.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-126)by Ying-Hsang Li