Last(ing) Thoughts about Human Information Behavior as a Science

Human information behavior is young and its curious newness has attracted those in education, information science, information technology, library science and the social sciences, some with great fervor. No voice has been more dominant in theorizing with some of its clever acronyms and its pseudo-scientific social observations.
Take a look at some of the diagrams and some of the charts and some of the measurements. This is definitely the softest of sciences and it uses the oldest of scientific instruments, human observation.
But human observation is at best, unreliable, so how can a “science” today be built on “human observation” as HIB continues to be?

Libraries today struggle with painting their walls and filling their shelves, except when it comes to videos and DVDs. We have become a more visual culture in the last 30 years. This coincides with a decline in reading skills. Are libraries still catering to a public that no longer exists, or are the functions of the library evolving to continue to meet the needs of their individual charters?

The library is at a crossroads between being a building and being a service. Human information behavior is studying the patterns that determine its institutional future. If human information behavior is performing a vital function in understanding the ways people seek information and that activity is vital and constant, then the knowledge coming from the studies could be applied to schools and libraries policies. With an adequate budget, any information source can survive, if it understands its constituencies, and principles of marketing.

Mrs. Morrow Stimulated the Soup

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, Jan/Feb, 32-42.

It is really no relief that Alfred North Whitehead wrote The Aims of Education almost 80 years ago, and there is still an almost criminal amount of useless knowledge being passed on from teacher to student from year to year. Why haven’t we learned that decontextualized learning just doesn’t stick? And if we have learned that, especially as information specialists (an offensive term, I think) we either believe that all of the theoretical concepts we have read and written about will suddenly become clear, or connected to some experience, or even become useful. But, then again, probably not. The curriculum goes on teaching abstract concepts as self-sufficient things, like carrots.
Knowing and doing cannot be separated. Its corollary also makes sense: using the tools of a profession without being inside the culture makes no sense.
The language is a tool, and learning it is a natural process. The best way is immersion. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated has some of the best examples of language learned directly from a dictionary rather than social experience. In other words, language is totally context-dependent. The article is built on the central metaphor that all tools are like language, and are acquired through situated use and practice.
How can classroom activity approach authentic activity? How can library practice approach authentic activity?
As long as there is education there will be education reform, and this article points to the lethargy of a system that does not work but has been situated for a long time.

Affective Aspects of the Information Search

Kulthau, C. (1991). Inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective. JASIS. 42(5):361-371.

In the early 1990s Kulthau was involved in articulating the stages of the information seeking process from the user’s perspective. The researchers in human information behavior rally around any theory that places the user at the center of the information universe.
Kulthau extends the meaning of John Seely Brown’s situated cognition theories which focus on the culture of learning as either useless or meaningful, that is, either effective or ineffective. Kulthau, as an educator, understands the integration of knowledge or search results into the user’s own life. She extends Dervin’s sense-making theories, and builds on Belkin’s ASK model.
It is significant for students or any users of information to realize that the process of research involves more than the search for sources, but is a transformation in what the user knows. If what the user finds out does not coincide with what the user already knows, then what happens? Uncertainty or confusion.

Art historians and secrecy

There are two theorists whose ideas make the most sense in relation to the way art historians work as practitioners: Kulthau, and Duguid. Situated cognition is especially relevant to the understanding of art historians, as is the culture of learning as examined by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. The aspect of sharing knowledge is a theme that needs to be explored. Even though art historians rely on colleagues for information and admit to being members of an invisibile college, they find it very important to gather information first-hand, and above all, claim their territory. The ultimate effect of these customs is that knowledge is held up for the most part, while other scholars step aside for works-in-progress which are simply gathering dust after an announcement of their beginnings, say, 10 - 15 years ago. Outrageous.
The apprenticeship of the art historian soon leads to connoisseurship.

Discursive Action from Wittgenstein to Kulthau

Kulthau, Carol C. (1991). Inside the search process: information seeking from the user’s perspective, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361-371. John Wiley and Sons Inc.

You can only procrastinate for so long before it’s time to take care of work. what did I do in my last lifetime to deserve to read articles like this? actually, that comment doesn’t apply that readily to kulthau's article. Kulthau was one of the pioneers in info seeking behavior by looking at affective and cognitive states and conducting empirical research. She looked at a variety of groups over a long period of time (longitudinal studies). thesis is qauite relevant for 1991. more than 10 years ago. studying user behavior wasn’t even a thought then. at least not from a social vantage point. I don’t get the social thing. I’ve always come from a rather personal and psychological model, so getting the social message hasn’t quite sunk in. I know a journal that is being looked at by someone else is a changed journal, not truly reflecting what I would say. like, this stinks. having to read social science articles with bad drawings that illustrate nothing. well, this really has more to do with other articles. now, on to carol kulthau. she is trying to find a new model to study information seeking. is aware of dervin’s research which preceded hers (1983), and agrees with dervin in that once a person can make meaningn or “make sense” of information or a task, then it’s all downhill from there. things will flow. but before that there is anxiety. and it’s ok, she assures us. the solution to a problem will be shared (109). kulthau derives her model from a series of five studies in info seeking behavior, and stresses that what a user feels and thinks during the early stages is important to pay attention to, and studies have not paid that any heed. kulthau points to further studies and urges further research based upon the groundbreaking she has done.
problems with systems based approach is tht the system doesn’t recognize different stages of information seeking, and will offer the same limited options to find an answer, which requires a more focused frame of mind than a user has in the beginning of a search. kulthau feels that her approach is unique in that it goes beyond the cognitive to examine the affective – the feelings that users commonly have when in a very early stage of exploration. uncertainty and anxiety must be addressed in system design and the reference interview. kulthau examines the users’ perspective of information seeking, and she does that by paying attention to what the user is feeling. a wonderful point is made about the discursive nature of information in that the user will have arrived and feel relieved when a personal perspective is found. kulthau compares five different theoretical foundations for ISP: phases of construction (Kelly), levels of need (Taylor), levels of specificity (Belkin), expression (Belkin, Taylor) and mood (Kelly). The five theories rest on a change in users’ feelings whether they be changes in thoughts which can alter the specificity of the need and its expression, feelings, or mood. kulthau feels that it may be more difficult to study thoughts and feelings, but it is the only way to find more out about information seeking behavior. by the way, what is the difference between affective feelings and feelings? can affective feelings be observed by someone else or must they be expressed by the user? sometimes we are not even sure what we feel, so even feelings are blurry.
increases in confidence corresponds to an increase in clarity and focus. but is kulthau talking about cause and effect, or a correlation that goes both ways? as we make more sense, we get better grades. god, this is so circular, as with most of the articles. but actually, I like kulthau, as she patiently moves from smaller and shorter studies and when the theory holds, moves to larger and longer studies. good research. looking at a small sample and then testing at a more significant level. info seekers go through three stages: at first seeking background information, then at midpoint seeking general information, and then moving in for the closure with specific questions, and the ability to make focused statements. the user changes throughout the process. the process is also looked at as a series of tasks in TABLE 3, in summary, moving from gathering to gathering/completing and then finally to writing or presenting. kulthau shares the view with many others that you must nurture the info seeking process, not writing too soon, not expecting ideas to be well-formed at the beginning. I feel that writing and thinking influence each other and that if you are willing to face your unformed and somewhat irrational thoughts, if you are willing to put them on paper, they will change what you know, and help you to construct meaning. kulthau’s theories are not unique. writing instructors urge their students to write in journals to learn discursively.


Tuominen, Kimmo and Savolainen, Reijo. A social constructionist approach to the study of information use as discursive action,

Definition and influential texts:
Most interesting article to date and needs more investigation. Text in conversation with the reader is probably the most interesting thing we have read to date. Talking through our artifacts. Many things in common with Dervin and Nilan who stress that the personal subjective is most important. Kulthau also stresses the importance of integrating information into a personal viewpoint. The text is simply a starting point. Have to trace some of the footnotes. Social constructionism dates back to Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 work “the social construction of reality” but since then other theories have influences it, namely poststructuralist thinking (Foucault), linguistic philosophy (Austin and Wittgenstein), etc. they are all included in Tuominen and Savolainen’s article. Social constructivism has influenced other disciplines such
as literary criticism and authors believe that socially and dialogically oriented research approaches will gain popularity in information studies. and they have already. the studies taking place now take into account the conversations going on with the text. or the interface the authors believe that. Dervin’s approach “communitarianism” comes very close to “constructionism.”
Other influences have appeared, namely (forget it, not enough time to mention, but I’ll return to the text later). Besides, this journal is for my benefit, and its map may not be clear to others but it is a discursive tool. I think here. A study of information use through the methodology of constructionism, based heavily in theory that no one ever understood anyway. Subjective approach. What is discourse? Talk and writing. interaction with text. everything is text. text is information. we can converse with anything. we change the text by discourse. this view stands in opposition to cognitive approach which dominated user studies until the 1970s. This article is also about making sense, i.e. the active role we take in interpreting texts and changing them through our interpretation. Too bad my critical viewpoint grew out of a McLuhanesque and Jungian perspective with little post-modern inclination. That was happening in Irvine, California and Paris. I thought that people realized that post-modern thought was a joke. That it was all for fun. Now, library science and
IT practitioners embrace it. That brings us to Umberto Eco and Travels in Hyperreality, something I have to study on my own. But Tuominen and Savolainen introduce us to social constructionism and its definitions:
language is not an abstract system disconnected from talking and writing. the human being is not the point of departure. the most important things take place in discursive interaction. knowledge is something people do together, not something that one person possesses. so I guess they’re talking about a cultural storehouse to which we each contribute, but we could not contribute if we did not build upon what others have shared with us. Is that it? there are amazing applications to the internet and the commons. the conduit between us – the networks and the online communities. oh, this has got to be hype.
authors build upon the making sense model of Dervin (1991)
Who is Jerome Bruner and the Cognitive Revolution. Let’s take a peek at the references. H-m-m-m—m-m—m-m. Acts of Meaning (1990). I’ll take it out of the library if they have it. So far I like the observation, “cognitive science employing the computer analogy has gravitated toward technical and culturally insignificant questions.” Yes. because according to the authors the analysis of social and cultural meaning is stifled through the analogy.
context is paramount.
authors defend their discursive methodology.
methods of description
influences: Wittgenstein, etc.

Real Questions, Real Needs

Dewdney, P. and Michell, G. (1997). Asking “why” questions in the reference interview: a theoretical justification. Library Quarterly 67(1), 50-71.

The sincerity of asking “why” on the part of librarians is generally misunderstood by patrons/information seekers. Patricia Dewdney and Gillian Michell return to visit an area rich in conflict and ripe for conflict resolution: the reference interview. A librarian’s best effort to figure out a patron’s motives may be misunderstood as intrusive, and responded to in a hostile manner. The authors apply two strategies to make “why” successful in a reference interview, contextualization and neutral questioning, relying on theory in “philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and communications” (51) to support their arguments, but are concerned with earlier work by Hutchins (1944), R. Taylor (1968).
Obviously, the well-known grouchiness of librarians has been around ever since the first reference question interrupted a librarian completing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. The librarian would naturally wonder “why” anyone would care to ruin another day in [her] life by asking [her] anything. Obviously, Robert Taylor and Nick Belkin and many others have stressed the importance of knowing why in order to know what a patron “really” wants to know. This topic first became relevant with Robert Taylor’s 1968 article on negotiating questions, and has pushed the human information behavior researcher’s pen to the paper for the past 40 years or so.Dewdney and Michell, although theorists, come up with some practical answers, albeit their responses to resolving the troublesome nature of “why” really takes much practice. First of all, librarians must be more sensitive to what is being conveyed by their questions. Speech act theory gives some insight into what philosophers and linguists rely on to determine the nature of communication between the librarian and the information seeker. Simple questions of fact can be confused with a request for more information. The “why” question also opens up other territory, some of which is not very comfortable for the librarian, like when the patron’s answer to the sweet and sincere librarian’s “Why are you asking me for this information?” gets a “None of your business” in reply. Theoretical considerations provide all the support for the authors as promised, although Dewdney obviously put in her field time training reference librarians prior to the publication of her dissertation in 1986 on the topic. The research interview obviously is not an easy one to conduct, regardless of what the question is, especially when even a ready reference question may have a hidden motive. The authors’ practical snippets of dialogue make the arguments clear, but for the reader, they are only the beginning of becoming a skilled reference interviewer. The reader must agree with the authors that a philosophical basis must be at the foundation of training reference workers. Without knowing the theoretical basis for actions, librarians will continue to misunderstand their patrons, and vice versa. A number of early source works from the article seem interesting in the light of what we think of as the first 50 years or so of human information behavior.

Where Information Lives

It’s the day after Ken Jackson spoke about NYC history and tied in Jewish history of the past 350 years here. He’s also from somewhere else.
EMC’s slogan is where information lives and it appears throughout their business communication with clients and shareholders beginning with a photo of a very stiff president. Someone you would expect. From a business school. Texas. Oil.
Harvard?
Southern money.
EMC adopted where information lives as its slogan.
Its story begins ... for emc, information is alive.
(I scan its bolder print)... the company deploys adapts grows stores and does all of this faster. EMC solves business problems.
With constant uptime, what time is left for dancing?

In Graffiti We Trust

The “new” East Village is design-perfect, approved by the hip and cool throughout. Restaurants, tattoo parlors, no bookstores, galleries, minimal inventories. The streets feel more narrow. The old neighbors mingle on weekends drinking Budweiser with visitors drinking Mojitos and exotic-flavored martinis.
Graffiti, once the outpost of the outsider is now part of the inside-out world of the East Village whose buildings and people are changing. Graffiti is now ornamental, part of the decorative element of the cityscape.
Part of the message of the present renewal of the East Village is that it incorporates the bohemian, drug-addled, poetic, ecstacy-crazed neighborhood into a gestalt of graffiti as design whose messages are no longer threatening or political. The old graffiti is simply a design element and has lost its power. The medium is the message.
On weekends the landscape overflows with visitors cramming into boutiques and restaurants to spend money. It is obvious that people are spending money and that is why they are carrying bags. Most of the shopkeepers are happy knowing that they are bringing goods and information to their shelves which people want to buy. It makes everyone happy when nobody is hungry.
The transformation of the East Village has taken place over many years, but now seems to be entering its final stages, although in New York City, the city itself is never finished, always renewing.
The odd thing is that the graffiti is no longer labeled radical outsider art that Basquiat and Haring once practiced. Of course Basquiat’s current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and Keith Haring’s designs on Swatch’s watchfaces clearly label them insiders now, AND HAVE FOR A LONG TIME.

The outsiders – old ex-cons and bad guys of the 70s and even before, let’s say the 50s or late 19th century have now become designer teachers and designer mentors and designers and their statements are meaningful in ways different than anyone would have ever suspected.

Useful Knowledge 

It Takes a Theory

Brown, J.S., Collins, A. & Duguid, P. (1989, Jan/Feb). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 32-42.
Covi, L.M. (1999). Material mastery: Situating digital library use in university research practices. Information Processing & Management 35, 293-316.
Gross, M. (2004). Children's information seeking at school: Findings from a qualitative study. In M.K. Chelton & C. Cool (Eds.), Youth Information-Seeking Behavior: Theories, Models and Issues, 211-240. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

The unbelievable thing about the three readings about theory and practice and education, namely Lisa Covi's article, Material Mastery, Brown and Duguid
s ...Situated cognition... and Gross's Children's information seeking at school look at the footnotes soon reveals that the debate about education and its purposes has raged since Plato was a child, but more recently even with the brilliance of theories put forth by Alfred North Whitehead in 1929 in his earth-shaking essay, the philosophy of education, the institution of education keeps the best ideas imprisoned in mere rhetoric. Of course the concept of education being relevant and useful is still trying to have its day. I think it's fair to say that education will always be a forum for change and challenge. But as far as our readings, the debate is whether the classroom is really the proper place to prepare for professional practice. Certainly in the case of librarianship, the answer is still, "no." At least the MLIS curriculum in falling short of really becoming skilled practicioners offers the internship as a practical solution. Then again. The task of bettering education is a political and economic problem, not simply a theoretical one.

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

So I've stolen my title from Carl Jung's journals, or at least his published ones. I am thinking that it is really crazy that someone can actually own the rights to publish someone else's memories and that permission may be withheld from anyone else. Anyway, this is my blog, and if anyone wants to simply cite me, I am happy enough. No fee. No blame. Promise.
This past week a lot happened. Class with Ross Todd touched on many topics, but began with his trip to work camps in Germany, notably Auschwitz and another one that starts with a "B" that I can't quite remember now. Ross decided that his mission to understand the holocaust, the most horrific human tragedy in human history, had to be abandoned during his actual visit. It was seeing the personal remains of flesh and blood people in the form of museum objects now -- shoes, combs, glasses-- that made the entire picture incomprehensible.
Although Ross thought that he abandoned his quest for understanding in the cognitive sense, my feeling is that he reached an emotional and personal understanding of the event, which is a deeper relationship with an event, even one that has not been experienced personally. We all yearn to feel the real thing. That is why when we read romantic poetry, we yearn to actually experience the feelings of the poets. Language alone is not the experience, at best a cultural construct, but sometimes it is so moving as to move us to tears or laughter or confusion.
This week I had a confrontation with two other pieces of memory, one minor and one major, that is, losing all the pictures I had taken that were stored on my phone camera; and, the loss of my mother's brother, Uncle Jack. The funeral is on Tuesday, and I am wondering what memories will do for reconstructing who he was. Others will come with their memories and all these memories will collide, but none will actually be able to rebuild the entity, Jack Marlan. This is my first small public memorial. They say that memories fade, but they do not know that sometimes memories make the past grow in size.
We have no choice about having memories or forgetting parts of the past, but when it came to Verizon choosing to replace my phone and not caring about the memories I had stored on my phone, I realized that the representation of memory, or memorials are important personal constructions. They mingle with the present, actually hold the present up in places, through tradition and ritual, but only the larger more commercial ones are universally recognized. For most of us fiction articulates the personal memories that are universal. Each of us carries our own information about the past. We all go on, sometimes connected by memories, dreams, and reflections.

What's in a Word?

6.1 Cool, C. (2001). The concept of situation in information science. ARIST 35, 5-42.

This article serves as a basic primer, if you will, on the published writings, both theoretical and empirical, of researchers in the field of Information Science [IS], and others in related disciplines, where the concept of situation or to use another, related term, context, is applicable. From the start, Cool observes that the terms, in spite of being used (one could justifiably say over-used) repeatedly for upward of twenty years, no one in IS to date has attempted to define what is meant by either term. In many of the IS writings, the two terms are often used interchangeably, and this, in addition to the lack of precise definitions for each term, has led to misunderstandings and unnecessary confusion. This article, in the attempt to rectify what the author acknowledges as a basic oversight, is therefore long overdue. As a laundry list of the writings useful to IS researchers interested in the varied applications and varieties of situation studies it is invaluable; as a clarification of the two terms, the article comes up short. It appears that the unraveling of the relationship of situation and context as it occurs in the literature proved to be more daunting than the author expected and she abandons the evaluation and concentrates on the role of situation, alone.

The article serves up six basic perspectives on what situation means in IS research. Breaking the issues down into Problematic Situation (essentially a phenomenological approach), Social Interaction Theory, The Situated Action Model, The Theory of Situation Awareness, the Person-In-Situation Model and the Situation as Information Environment, Cool presents the leading articles associated with each theoretical approach, and in those instances where she is heavily invested in the theory, she gives an extensive analytic investigation, providing probing insights and explanations. Theories of situation in IS that Cool does not warm to are less aggressively discussed, often presented as a running list of titles with no additional insights offered. As an example, it appears that Cool, in spite of her own contribution to the discussion of Social Interaction Theory (an application I am particularly interested in due to the curious questions suggested by the personal associative contexts between say, a “school library clerk” and a school child, or the social interaction required between an researcher and an impersonal data base) she only devotes a scant three pages, while her assessment of the Problematic Situation, the lead off discussion, is given four and a half. I must admit, that the phenomenological approach represented here by the work of Schutz & Luckmann, Taylor, Dervin, Kuhlthau, and heavily on the investigations of Belkin and his colleagues whose definition of the concept of the anomalous state of knowledge (discussed in reading 3.2) is key to an understanding of IS in general, are some of the more original theoretical writings in the field. (In the interest of avoiding redundancy I am not going to discuss the various points presented in each of the six theoretical approaches outlined by Cool as the purpose of the article itself is to do that. In many cases, moreover, the writings Cool presents here are the subjects of other readings in this journal exercise.)

There are a few things that kept grating on me while reading the review list. Cool consistently refers to “the IS literature” and that certain concepts “(have) a long tradition in IS” as if IS is a pedagogical field with a pedigree equivalent to history, geology, philosophy or any of the other disciplines. This in spite of the disclaimer in the introduction that “the theoretical literature reviewed spans several disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communication.” A head count of Cool’s bibliography bears this disclaimer out. All the entries relating to IS date from the late 80s to 2000, with the exception of Belkin’s contributions from the early 80s. All bibliographic entries dated earlier (one can safely assume the seminality of these) come from other disciplines including the ones cited by Cool. I am reminded of Bates’s concept of “berry-picking” here, in the tendency of “new sciences” like IS to play hopscotch through existing disciplines for ideas. (Have you ever spoken to someone with a PhD in History from Harvard about how they feel about Yale’s American Studies program? If you have, then you know what I mean.)

For the record:
According to Webster's:

context is defined as "the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning" (think New York Times here, they way they "surround a story".)
situation is defined as " the way in which something is placed in relation to its surroundings"

Take the sentence "The fish is in the frying pan."

The frying pan is context.

The fish is in the situation.

What if someone wrote the truth about these readings?

To be honest, I am about three weeks behind in my responses, not my readings, to be sure, just my responses. I just find it so difficult to write with any intelligence when I am writing about or to them. I just spin off onto other topics, like now. I read a terrific review of a book I will run off and get, Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, and do you know why? Because the review says that it is the first time that a character writes honestly about himself on one of those high school reunion forums. In other words, if life has failed us, we write about it. Well, that's what communication should be like, honestly. This blog will hopefully make an honest writer of me. But how can it, when I am (now, look at the heading of the page, dear reader) doing this for a grade? I would rather be honest and gradeless, but that is not the context here. More later. Much later.

The Search Goes On

Dr. Marcia Bates, a UCLA professor, designed a theoretical system that leaves the classic IR model in the dust, and rightly so. Bates, continues in the direction that Belkin began paving earlier in the research, and questioned by Bates and others, “Why cannot the system make it possible for the searcher to express the need directly as they would ordinarily, instead of in an artificial query representation for the system’s consumption?” (409)
This is the basis for the berrypicking model, which is simply the act or art of searching in a way closely related to the way in which real people search for real information, and in what Bates feels is a model that an IR system must design and imitate to accommodate a human search, rather than designing a system that is more sophisticated in itself, but more difficult or ineffective for a human to use. In essence, like HDTV, the sharper image is not the most sophisticated picture.
Bates understands the nature of the human search and describes it simply as a “bit-at-a-time” retrieval, like berrypicking. This technique is far different from the linearity of previous models in that it acknowledges the shifting needs of the searcher as the search progresses, the various sources that must be consulted throughout the search, the various methodologies that are employed by most searchers when looking for something, and even the change in the nature of the search. Bates distinguishes between browsing and berrypicking, and advances our appreciation for browsing, not as a waste of time, but as a productive part of searching, and one that has meaning for search engines. But, how can browsing be incorporated into an online search to retrieve meaningful “hits” when the searcher is not quite certain about the search itself? Well, it’s a matter of serendipitous discovery, and stumbling upon information that changes the nature of the search, and gives the curvy shape to the journey.
Of course, not everyone is capable nor willing to be so intuitive, nor so brave as to admit that one’s initial thesis stinks, and one should take a new and better path in complete contradiction to one’s original ideas. I have and will, but some (most?) would rather stick with heartless ideas and at least finish within a reasonable time. Like Castaneda, I would rather choose the path with heart. Even if it means I have a heap of notes after 15 years? Yup. W.B. did, but maybe for different reasons. His briefcase was much heavier than mine.
Bates incorporates her findings into practical design aspects, which in the last 15 years have actually been built into some of our best search engines, and some which are yet to come, and some which seem at best, impractical and useless.
In 1989, the idea of flipping through a book on screen was not a reality as far as I know, and when Amazon first announced its page-turning tool in 2003 or 2004, everyone was amazed. Was this thanks to Bates? I have to think that the universe thinks of things together like some giant world brain (thanks to H.G. Wells for that idea).

4.2 Bates, M. (1989). The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface. Online Review, 13(5), 407-424.

It Is Our Pleasure To Serve You

Puritanical approach: do your own work ethos. Taylor’s work takes place at the reference desk. Reference today is in cyberspace, sometimes. This is a theoretical model for reference librarians. Based upon observations of people. Far from the single event model. Terrible illustrations. Reference librarians are involved in negotiating information. communication. Although there is a structure to the interview, there are also compromises due to language and communication, which at best, is a miracle. If I ask,
where is the water fountain, I may get a concrete answer, but if I ask what were the causes of the Civil War, a reference librarian may need to know at what level I need info and for what purposes. Taylor has five filters (see p 128) which describe an information seeker and the stages through which a question passes. these are not absolute or fixed (p 85). These filters help the librarian find the answer that is appropriate to the task of the info seeker. The only problem is that all of these filters will not help if the info seeker can not get past the first stage, determining a subject. Actually, one can browse for info and find it. when one needs info, the question must fall into a category for someone else to find it in the system. Those categories are limited by the controlled vocabulary of a system OPAC or the limitations of either the info seeker or intermediary in narrowing. Taylor’s analysis is early (1968) in the science of information seeking, but is built upon by others, such as Nick Belkin. His focus on background information of the user is not the most useful information in 2004. Also, it assumes that librarians are apt at understanding human behavior, when some librarians are completely clueless as to the motivations and behavior of a user. Especially if they have had no socialization at an early age. Librarians who have not had much human interaction outside of their careers bring little to the negotiating table because they do not understand human behavior. Those who have studied psychology may be able to benefit from the discipline.
In Taylor’s system, the seeker and librarian are in a dynamic act of communication, but it can be studied and made more effective from an LIS standpoint. Taylor stresses that more interaction is needed between the librarian and the info seeker. Librarians should not just jump to an answer, but must first find the right question. One of the most rushed info sessions is the “Ask a Librarian” type session or any one of its many forms. Without in-person clues, most librarians will simply jump to a conclusion and refer the patron to a couple of web pages. Bah, humbug!!!
Questions are different from commands. Commands can only happen in later stages of info seeking.

Taylor, R.S. (1968) Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries. College and Research Libraries, 28, 178-194. American Library Association (ALA).

You Can't Always Get What You Want

This little blurb was from an article I read online while searching for some information myself, about hmmmmm... natural language processing. which, as it turns out is really about human information behavior, or where it leads in the real world – search engines and the Internet:

“Probabilistic or statistical systems use probability and statistics to predict what might be not only exact, but close matches to a query. In these systems, you get what you ask for, but you might also get what you should have asked for. Unfortunately, you also retrieve other documents that contain your query terms, but not the information you wanted.”

NLP meets the jabberwocky, Susan Feldman, 5/1999, Online. accessed through www.highbeam.com on 1/27/2005.

We had thought all along that all roads led to Rome, when in actuality, they all lead to Mick Jagger.

I Thought You'd Never ASK

3.2 Belkin, N.J. (1980). Anomalous states of knowledge as a basis for information retrieval. Canadian Journal of Information Science, 133-143.

Dr. Nick Belkin, who is credited with the theory known by the clever acronym ASK is one of the theorists who moved away from IR theory focused on system to theory based on the synthesis of previous schema, mainly Taylor’s and Kochen’s, both based on the user’s recognition that something is wrong in the situation of the user.
The original audience for this concept was IR specialists. Now the audience is both library students and IR specialists. The basic nagging question is: how do we make sense of a vague question and be of service to a user of information?
There are things that we know completely, and other things which we would like to know, but we do not have the ability to transform them from their blurry (anomalous) state into a coherent question of 25 words or less. Theoretically, people do not want information; they want to solve problems. that brings information seeking behavior to another level. All library work and information seeking is built on this foundation. But, what is information -- something that comes in packets, knowledge communicated, something that contains a message. Sounds elementary. But it isn’t. New ways to look at info seeking as purpose oriented or task oriented. HIB differs from person to person depending on the level (from individual to cultural); context ( environmental, long-term short-term, important or unimportant; kinds ( generating, disseminating, collecting, etc.).
Nick Belkin is famous for developing the ASK model (anomalous state of knowledge), which has been cited and built upon by current scholars in LIS. It is a cognitive model, which means that theoretically its focus is concerned with the mental activities of users, not the capabilities of the machines/systems that serve human needs for information seekers.
Process of information seeking is not linear, but circuitous or iterative. ASK changes by receiving information. That is, the answer (intermediate search) will and can change the question and change the direction of the user and his/her behavior.
Belkin believes that the ASK framework brings up more problems than answers, but that is the nature of LIS today, to attract more researchers to work on solutions to non-specifiable needs and how to translate them into commands which locate the right information, which can be complex and abstract or concrete.
Much work still needs to be done on retrieving information, but Google is still the best for most people’s money. After all, your librarian even “googles,” although an admission in writing may be a stretch.
What other search engine has its own dictionary entry? Well, what other search engine has become part of our everyday vocabulary, and has its own dictionary entry? Google is God, some say. Regardless of what some say, what Webster says, matters.
Terms to take away from this article: human generator, human user, non-specifiability of need
Despite the fact that there is little explanation of basic definitions by the author and the diagrams do not support the material, this is an early article that paved the way for further research (just as the author had hoped it would 25 years ago).

Context is No Con

Finally! Human information behavior is vogue. All the work that Belkin, Todd, Wilson, and Dervin did has finally made an impact on the world of searching. Implications are that students in library school are learning relevant skills, and will actually be able to transfer those skills to the workplace. Google and Yahoo! and MSN, too, are in need of matching users to answers and coming up with more relevance in their searches. Here, read the headlines for yourself. Yahoo! launches 'contextual' search Let's hope I learn to use RSS technology soon, so I can feed my readers some really relevant info I come across in my everyday life. The key to context is relationships, and although human relationships are by far the most difficult, they are also the most sublime. Hypertext has come a long way in making new relevancies and new meanings. The new search engines represent a true step forward in moving theory off the pages of our texts and into our query boxes. When our search engines can actually come up with answers to questions that we ourselves barely state in an adequate way, then our dreams and accomplishments in human information behavior measure high on the scale.

Groundhog Day and Predictability

2/2/2005
Groundhog Day
6 more weeks of winter. I don’t know what is worse, six more weeks of winter or 12 more weeks of HIB readings. I guess people want to know the future, but especially if the news is good. Groundhog Day is about knowing the future and appraising truth. Is it scientific? Do people consider it valid, or is it just another silly ritual that people have invented?
Certainly proof is not prognostication. The tortoise shell was once an ancient oracle used by the Chinese to prognosticate. But I think we have to realize that the groundhog argument is an appeal to the feelings rather than to reason.
Meltzoff discusses many reasons to believe, but his main ideas, and ones that should long ago have been hammered into our brains in English Composition 101, when writing our first essays, or evaluating our first articles with an ounce of critical reasoning, would be captured in the bold headings that Meltzoff uses to organize his methods for seeking truth: Faith, Reason, Feeling, Sensory Information, Legal Methods, and Empirical and Experimental Methods. Meltzoff also offers his own methodology for reading scientific studies critically. If Meltzoff’s own advice holds up to criticism then it will be of great help in a course where scrutinizing and critiquing theory is at its heart. Basically, Meltzoff’s ideas are quite basic, which is in fact quite helpful. Unfortunately, we cannot select articles to read simply because the title sounds as “though it might be of interest.” In fact, one of the least interesting aspects of the readings is the titles. Meltzoff offers a basic checklist for approaching research articles, and that is to be interactive, say, speak to the text by writing back to it, and look for the three components, the hypothesis, the data, and the discussion, and if all the parts are not there, or if there are some inconsistencies, then trust your judgment. The research can be flawed, even if it has passed the discerning red pen of the editor, when the editor is the first cousin of the author who owes them a favor.

1.2 Critical Thinking about Research by J. Meltzoff

Ben & Jerry's and the Census Bureau

Yesterday I received the latest message from one of the fifty million listservs I belong to. I think it was about the latest updates to the Census Bureau's database. Exciting. What's really exciting is that information is moving in an exciting new direction, bringing the US Census Bureau and Ben & Jerry's into a new era. We are moving from settling for the primitive answers we used to settle for with Magic Eight Ball to the more precise answers of RSS, sometimes called Really Simple Syndication, and sometimes called Really Stupid Syndication. What's really great is that this high-powered tool has made answers to questions really relevant, and will help match people asking questions with the right answers. This will create a really great relief for the already understaffed libraries around the country who need to create a FAQ file that actually works with natural language processing. That must be what's behind this. The Census Bureau uses a company with a very cool logo. As of right now, sales of Magic Eight Ball are still brisk.

Definitions and Theories

Human Information Behavior .... hmmmm. If HIB is a field or respected discipline, then what is its primary journal, who is its primary founder(s), what are its body of beliefs and theories, agreed-upon definitions? When human information behaviorists use the word context, what do they mean? constructivist? is it taken from Foucault? or from some other theorist? I need my OED. Where is the Handbook of HIB? What is the most respected book in the field? The most respected journal?

Class Notes: 25 Jan 2005

Human Information BehaviorLast night's class was a vital introduction to the field. I still have my reservations about the application of the word field to HIB. Are LIS people the only people studying HIB, oh, and IT people, of course, since the crash, notwithstanding, when the great diaspora took place. All those programmers leaving their six figure jobs to join forces with real information people, and people who care about the written word, not just documentation, to create a world, where metaphors matter, and must exist.

Blizzard Makes Reading Easier

Yahoo!Today I will look for evidence in the Sunday New York Times that people at leisure are actually interested in looking for information when relaxing. Does the search for information ever really stop?

Human Information Behavior

Human Information Behavior

Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City is the central character in the four-person over-30 drama of four thirty-something Manhattanites who live on cocktails and openings. and they gather information. especially Carrie. the writer.