Uncertainty, in general, is a fundamental aspect of human activity and underlies much of our decision making. The notion of uncertainty in information seeking, in particular, dates back to Shannon and Weaver (1949) and since then has been investigated in many forms. Kulthau’s (1993) work on information uncertainty is perhaps the most extensive. Through two specific examples, this article propos...

Despite the many implicit references to the social contexts of search within Information Seeking and Retrieval research, there has been relatively little work that has specifically investigated the additional requirements for collaborative information seeking interfaces. Here, we re-assess a recent analytical inspection framework, designed for individual information seeking, and then apply it t...

Knowledge learning is recognized as an important component in people’s search process. Existing studies on this topic usually measure the knowledge growth before and after a search. However, there still lacks a fine-grained understanding of users’ knowledge change patterns within a search process and users’ adoption of different sources for learning. In this on-going project, we are exploring a...

The medical students of Obafemi Awolowo University were assessed for general use of library and for their information seeking behavior. The objectives of the study were to evaluate students’ perception of the demands for locating clinical information; to determine if they sought current information and sources most often used for their current information. Five hundred medical students comprisi...

This research investigates what information German Fairtrade coffee consumers search for during pre-purchase information seeking and to what extent information is retrieved. Furthermore, the sequence of the information search as well as the degree of cognitive involvement is highlighted. The role of labeling, the importance of additional ethical information and its quality in terms of concreten...

Document triage is the critical point in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need. This complex process is not yet well understood, and subsequently we have undertaken a comparison of this task in both electronic and paper media. The results reveal that in each medium human judgement is influenced by different factors, and...

Collaborative querying seeks to help users formulate queries by sharing expert knowledge or other users’ search experiences. This paper reports evaluation results for a collaborative querying environment. Our results show that compared with traditional information retrieval environments, collaborative querying can lead to faster information seeking when users perform unspecified tasks.

Introduction. Uncertainty is understood as an important component of the information seeking process, but it has not been explored as a component of reference and information service. Method. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to examine the practitioner perspective of reference and information service for eight academic research librarians in the United States. Analysis. Data we...

, the author seeks to answer the following questions: What characterizes the queries that end users submit to online IR systems? What search features do people use? What features would enable them to improve on the retrievals they have in hand? What features are hardly ever used? What do end users do in response to the system's retrievals? Are end users satisfied with their online searches? Sum...