Information need

The term information need is often understood as an individual or group's desire to locate and obtain information to satisfy a conscious or unconscious need. Rarely mentioned in general literature about needs, it is a common term in information science. According to Hjørland (1997) it is closely related to the concept of relevance: If something is relevant for a person in relation to a given task, we might say that the person needs the information for that task.

Information needs are related to, but distinct from information requirements. They are studied for:

The concept of information needs was coined by an American information journalist Robert S. Taylor in his 1962 article "The Process of Asking Questions" published in American Documentation (renamed Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology).

In this paper, Taylor attempted to describe how an inquirer obtains an answer from an information system, by performing the process consciously or unconsciously; also he studied the reciprocal influence between the inquirer and a given system.

According to Taylor, information need has four levels:

There are variables within a system that influence the question and its formation. Taylor divided them into five groups: general aspects (physical and geographical factors); system input (What type of material is put into the system, and what is the unit item?); internal organization (classification, indexing, subject heading, and similar access schemes); question input (what part do human operators play in the total system?); output (interim feedback).

Herbert Menzel preferred demand studies to preference studies. Requests for information or documents that were actually made by scientists in the course of their activities form the data for demand studies. Data may be in the form of records of orders placed for bibliographics, calls for books from an interlibrary loan system, or inquires addressed to an information center or service. Menzel also investigated user study and defined information seeking behaviour from three angles:

...
Wikipedia