Am just back from a trip to GSLIS at McGill (great people, wonderful hospitality) where I spoke last week to faculty and students there on the future of information studies and the need for us to more aggressively position the field through better research and a focus on real world issues. I mentioned, rather bluntly, that I consider the world not to be in need of any more models of information seeking behavior, since I consider there to be far too many of these out there already. Worse, most of these are not really models at all but vague representations involving arrows, boxes and circles that contain little more than common sense. I doubt anyone will really listen to this since one sure way of making a career as an academic in LIS is to find a group that has never been studied explicitly and then describing their behaviors as if these were unique or important. I joke that there really ought to be a model generating algorithm out there rather like those “How to Speak Postmodern” or “Create your own Blues Singer” guides which contain three separate lists of terms that can be combined in any order to give you phrases such as ‘Hyper-modern multivocalities” or names like “Jumping Jake Humperdinck”. For information seeking models it could be as simple as listing age, gender and job characteristics (e.g., the info seeking behavior of middle-aged, male, clergy etc.). We could get more sophisticated and add task or media attributes once we have exhausted the possibilites of three attributes. Maybe we are there already.
Of course, I expect a ‘model’ to have some predictive value in helping us understand what people do, so this is probably a minority concern for now but it has me thinking about the need for a corrective in the LIS literature.
Most models of information seeking behavior look at more than behavior, they consider cognition which is quite natural for information activities, except that behavior and cognition are not the same. I can let this slide and go with Wilson ‘s (1999) slightly unwieldy definition of information behavior as ‘those activities a person may engage in when identifying his or her own needs for information, searching for such information in any way, and using or transferring that information”. Should this not be a reasonable concern of information researchers? It could certainly be if the fruits of that research shed real insight but it’s not clear that we have gained much from all this effort. Most models allude to environmental or contextual drivers, some responses by a human, and a state change resulting in feedback. They are presented often in a form of flowchart that seems to indicate a logical human process abstracted by careful examination.
Wilson’s (1999) article Models of Information Behaviour Research synthesizes many of the popular models into a nested framework that reveals many of the similarities among models but in so doing highlights for me the paucity of real content in any one of them. I was surprised nobody challenged my view but then again, the challenge requires an example of a model that really works. Maybe I am just expecting too much here, but for the sake of Information Studies, I hope not!
You are my hero. The class I took in library school that inculcated one or two of these models (and accomplished absolutely nothing else) was the single most useless course I have ever taken in a university setting (and that’s ten years of coursework for me!).
Bias note: it was also the only library school course I didn’t get an A in, not that I was much of a grade-monkey in library school.
I would be first in line to join a movement aimed at wiping that course out of library-school curricula everywhere. Yes, we need to understand what our patrons need and how they think — so how about we replace all this absurd theoretical modeling with a solid grounding in survey and focus-group research, and similar evidence-based practices?
I had to laugh out loud when I saw this post. Thank you for that.
The harder task for practitioners seems to be connecting the existing models with design patterns, so we can say ‘middle-aged male clergy exihibit behavior as in this model, therefore consider using these design patterns.”
And although we have enough models, practitioners such as information architects don’t know about them, with the possible exception of berry-picking.
Isn’t all this “modeling” just a ntural part of the knowledge cycle? : thesis-antithesis-synthesis …perhaps where we are now is in the “anti” phase with lots of conflicting concepts that will enventually blend into something useful?
Also, your “generate your own X” comments reminded me of dack’s funny-ish Web Economy BS Generator from a while ago:
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
(with apologies for the use of rude words)
Good to see someone challenging the thinking on how we work with and analyse information.
I work in knowledge management, and I find many of those KM and information system flow-charts one comes across just tell me nothing. And I’m a visual, big-picture kind of person.
I secretly admire the people who can make those flow-charts, because they have a skill to make diagrams like that look plausible and fool everybody. Very crafty.
Maybe we won’t be fooled anymore?
Greg
I agree with Victor. Many of the models are unknown to lots of information practicioners, like information architects. They could potentially be helpful to structuring thought around information design problems. But the models are conceived of and end in an academic environment. Their purpose is to inform theory (and to get published, tenure, etc.).
If they could be made actionable, would you still object?
I’ve attempted to make models of information behavior more tangible to practicioners in some of my writings and presentations. Usually, people appreciate that and can take something away. So I wouldn’t necessarily jettison them all en masse. They just need a new spin, one that helps real people solve real problems.
Further, what’s wrong with a model that appears as being common sense? Isn’t that a good thing is someone can see it and immediately think “I can relate to that”? Stating the obvious is not bad.
Finally, beyond behavior and cognition, what about emotions? I believe we need to a model for information experience, which would necessarily include emotional aspects of seeking information. After all, “data is stored and information is experienced.” [1] So why aren’t we talking about information experience?
[1] Andrew Dillon
Hmm. I think there’s a real hunger among practitioners to understand the needs and habits of different user groups. For example, I wish I had a proverbial nickel for every time I’ve heard a web professional express bewilderment at the success of MySpace. The assumption is that there’s something about the current crop of web kiddies which makes them adore a site that breaks every design heuristic developed in the past 13 years, yet no one can state authoritatively what that something is.
I agree with James Kalbach that the emotional aspect of seeking information should be an area of emerging interest. I’d go further and question whether “information seeking” isn’t a narrow and discipline-centric term. Since we’re in Information Studies our job must be to study people’s behavior regarding information, right? But a huge portion of what people do online isn’t about seeking “information,” it’s about engaging in experiences. To say that MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Second Life, Warcraft, or IM is about “information” is like saying that baseball is about box scores. Despite the examples I’ve chosen, this is not a “web 2.0” phenomenon; I’d argue that the same is true of much e-mail.
Note that I am not calling for another naming war — please dear god let no one ever rename an iSchool to an xSchool! — but I do think that our choice of labels may once again be constraining our thinking.
Amen.
Well, I am all for greater awareness of the role of emotion and have written/said as much for years but my major complaint over the seeking models is they are just too vague to be useful. If a model is just common sense (a much over-rated attribute given the world we inhabit) then it does not need to be packaged as a model and attributed to a scholar. If it’s more than common-sense then it presumably predicts something that common sense does not or would not uniquely – that’s the test.
Yes, practitioners do want guidance, the problem is many of these models pretend to offer that guidance but fail. We can provide input on the needs and habits of different user groups without resorting to models, but hey, that’s not so good for staking a claim on the literature.
Maybe I just need to practice my flowcharts……
While there may be some info seeking models that are useful, providing reminders of the range of cognitive activities performed when working with information (Xie’s comes to mind), many of the info seeking publications are so broad or so non-generalizable, there’s nothing available to those of us working with design problems. And certainly its true that the i and d disciplines don’t communicate well with one another at all. Brenda Dervin’s research and upcoming panel at ASIST 2007 is a timely confrontation of this issue.
I’ve found some of the problem with info seeking models and studies is the very notion of “seeking” and user intention. What we should be seeking to understand is activity, and the use of information in activity. The deployment of information resources in science is a production activity, not “seeking” in the way we define it. By pre-constraining our field of inquiry into something that can be turned into a model, we have already limited ourselves to the most operational part of the user’s work practice. A Google search, or whatever, basically. In this mis-representation of information and practice, we miss the whole point of a person’s “information need.” To get their work done!
Interesting… Several years ago, during my job interview I said the same thing about models, I was considered “insane”..
Any complex model will reach the stage of glory and will collapse at some point. Only the simplest one that can adapt FAST to the information demand and technology environments has a chance to survive. Look at evolution; compare dinosaurs vs. amoeba (with its flexibility). Nature doesn’t make mistakes, humans do. Check businesses: some of them collapse and some of them survive due their flexibility and adaptation to modern technology developments/demands. Etc. etc, etc.
What is a plan “B” or a “recovery model” for information seeking models that collapse? Flowcharts? Probably, they are easy to modify.