This paper was commissioned by Professor Gernot Wersig of the Freie Universität, Berlin in 1980, as part of his Project, Methodeninstrumentarium zur Benutzforschung in Information und Dokumentation. It attempted to set out what was, for the time, a novel perspective on appropriate methodologies for the study of human information seeking behaviour, focusing on qualitative methods and action rese...

We describe an “expert coach” for students’ collaborative information seeking and knowledge construction. This coach compares an expert’s prespecification of the evidential relations among “snippets” of HTML-based text with the current state of a diagram constructed by students in the course of collaborative scientific inquiry. The expert advises the students by pointing out information that ma...

this study aims at the analysis of the discourse of the art in the middle east. therefore, at the first stage, after criticizing the limitations of the theory of style in the modern art analysis, we emphasize discourse analysis as an alternative approach; at the second stage, we apply discourse approach in order to analyze the art in the middle east. the discourse analysis of art consists, at o...

The Internet has become an important and preferred source of health information. Although the literature has highlighted several key predictors that influence an individual's online health information seeking behavior, insufficient attention has been paid to the changes in the predictors' roles and effects over time. This study explores and compares the effects that specific predictors had on o...

In understanding a person’s information seeking behavior and choice of information sources, it becomes very important to understand the context surrounding the search. This context gives rise to the information need and leads a person to look for information. Research in information seeking behavior, while concentrating on systemand-person centric research, has, so far, left out studying how in...

Purpose – The philosophical position known as critical realism is briefly introduced, and some of its central features are used to connect the philosophy and the realist social theory to some current library and information science (LIS) models of information behaviour. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a literature-based analysis of the critical realism concepts of a stratified soci...

In this paper we argue for a combined approach of logging analysis and interview techniques to evaluate the usability of web distributed applications. Logging analysis has proven as an efficient and effective method to investigate websites usability. However it seems insufficient for more complex applications. We outline a case study of a library search system, in which users’ information seeki...