The many faces of accessibility: engineers' perception of information sources

Numerous studies of engineers information seeking behavior have found that accessibility was the factor that influenced most their selection of information sources. The concept of accessibility, however, is ambiguous and was given various interpretations by both researchers and engineers. Detailed interviews with 32 engineers, in which they described incidents of personal information seeking in depth, uncovered some of the specific factors that are part of the concept. Engineers selected sources because they had the right format, the right level of detail, a lot of information in one place, as well as for other reasons. When looking for human information resources, the engineers most frequently selected sources with which they were familiar, while saving time was the most frequently mentioned reason for selecting documentary sources. Future research should continue to examine the concept of accessibility through detailed empirical investigations. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.