Judgment of information quality during information seeking and use in the workplace

This continuing research looks into how professionals search, judge, utilise, and communicate information in order to complete work-related tasks and smooth collaborative information behaviour in the workplace. Specifically, this paper reports results from a case study of judgment of information quality behaviour of a marketing professional during information seeking and use at workplace. The preliminary findings include: the marketing professional sought information from internal document, people and email sources as well as external educational, general and research sources to complete 16 work tasks during five working days. The work tasks served as a contextual factor affecting the marketing professional’s selections of information sources and his criteria in the decision making with respect to information quality. Beyond relevance assessment, coverage, accuracy, recommended by supervisor/colleague at work and reliability were important criteria for information source quality. For another, comprehensiveness, accuracy, and credibility were considered as three most important criteria for judging information content quality. Implications for future research are also discussed.