Abstract
Purpose
People face barriers and failures in various kinds of information seeking experiences. These are often attributed to either the information seeker or the system/service they use. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why individuals fail to fulfill their information needs in all contexts and situations. It addresses the limitations of existing studies in examining the context of the task and information seeker’s strategy and seeks to gain a holistic understanding of information seeking barriers and failures.
Design/methodology/approach
The primary method used for this investigation is a qualitative survey, in which 63 participants provided 208 real life examples of failures in information seeking. After analyzing the survey data, ten semi-structured interviews with another group of participants were conducted to further examine the survey findings. Data were analyzed using various theoretical frameworks of tasks, strategies, and barriers.
Findings
A careful examination of aspects of tasks, barriers, and strategies identified from the examples revealed that a wide range of external and internal factors caused people’s failures. These factors were also caused or affected by multiple aspects of information seekers’ tasks and strategies. People’s information needs were often too contextual and specific to be fulfilled by the information retrieved. Other barriers, such as time constraint and institutional restrictions, also intensified the problem.
Originality/value
This paper highlights the importance of considering the information seeking episodes in which individuals fail to fulfill their needs in a holistic approach by analyzing their tasks, information needs, strategies, and obstacles. The modified theoretical frameworks and the coding methods used could also be instrumental for future research.
Subject
Library and Information Sciences,Information Systems
Reference46 articles.
1. Information seeking and use by newspaper journalists;Journal of Documentation,2003
2. How does search behaviour change as search becomes more difficult?,2010
3. Braque: design of an interface to support user interaction in information retrieval;Information Processing and Management,1993
4. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data?;Perspectives on Psychological Science,2011
5. Conceptual framework for tasks in information studies;Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,2005
Cited by
12 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献