Information seeking behavior

Information seeking behavior refers to the way people search for and utilize information. The term was coined by Thomas D. Wilson in his 1981 paper, on the grounds that the then current 'information needs' was unhelpful as a basis for a research agenda, since 'need' could not be directly observed, while how people behaved in seeking information could be observed and investigated. However, there is increasing work in the information searching field that is relating behaviors to underlying needs.

In 2000, Wilson described information behavior as the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information-seeking, and information use. He described information seeking behavior as purposive seeking of information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal. Information seeking behavior is the micro-level of behavior employed by the searcher in interacting with information systems of all kinds, be it between the seeker and the system, or the pure method of creating and following up on a search.

A variety of theories of information behavior – e.g. Zipf's principle of least effort, Brenda Dervin's sensemaking, Elfreda Chatman's life in the round – seek to understand the processes that surround information seeking. The analysis of the most cited publications on information behavior during the first years of this century shows its theoretical nature. Together with some works that have a constructivist focus, using references to Dewey, Kelly, Bruner and Vigotsky, others mention sociological concepts, such as Bourdieu's habitus. Several adopt a constructionist-discursive focus, whereas some, such as Chatman, who can in general be described as using an ethnographic perspective, stand out for the quantity and diversity of references to social research. The term 'information behaviour' was also coined by Wilson and occasioned some controversy on its introduction, but now seems to have been adopted, not only by researchers in information science but also in other disciplines.

The digital world is changing human information behavior and process. Focused almost exclusively on information seeking and using, information receiving, a central modality of the process is generally overlooked. As information seeking continues to migrate to the Internet, and artificial intelligence continues to advance the analysis of user behavior on the Internet across a range of user interactions, information receiving moves to the heart of the process, as systems "learn" what users like, want and need, as well as their search habits.

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