Scrapbook - Unit 7

10.5.06

I believe the way we search for information, down to what we judge as relevant, is affected by very subjective things. What I mean by this is, if Alex and I are writing a research paper on the very same topic for the very same professor, depending on our mindset that day, one of us may find one document relevant and not another. Our judgments on relevancy or even how we search for documents are affected by everything from our surroundings to what our mood is that day. Making sense of the returned documents or of the system in general, is affected by our emotional mindset - a bad mood or a good mood can change one's outlook quite easily. This doesn't even take into account our individual knowledge of the subject and how that affects the documents we retrieve. From our life experiences, every individual person has a certain amount of knowledge or opinions about certain subjects that affect how the judge documents.

I also think that knowing your personal strengths/limitations for this topic is the same as knowing your personal strengths/limitations for any other topic. It can help you grow as an information seeker - having knowledge of your biases towards information seeking lets you be aware of them, thus preventing some of the affect they have on your information seeking.

In designing any type of system I think it is important to know your audience as much as possible. If you're Google, this may just be impossible! But if you're designing an academic search engine or helping a particular person with their computer woes, you have some room for interpretation. Know who the system is defined for and why they need to use it and you can design an effective system that keeps end users happy!

DB

I posted the information below to the discussion board but felt putting it here was also appropriate.

My tour interests are the information seeking habits of the information poor. In general, how and why do people who typically don't search for information find it? And why is it that they are not typical information seekers? The article I read was on the information seeking habits of women with breast cancer - a very unique perspective from people seeking a very specific type of information. The citation is below:

Rees, C. E. and Bath, P. A. (2001). "Information-Seeking Behaviors of Women with Breast Cancer". Oncology Nursing Forum, Vol. 28, No. 5, pp. 899-907.

The authors distributed 202 surveys and held 3 discussion groups (each with 10 people) to find out how certain people sought information on breast cancer post diagnosis and why others avoided information on the topic altogether. They found that some people are information avoiders - i.e., they don't seek information for fear of worrying. Others are high-monitoring information seekers - they want every piece of information they can find in hopes of feeling in control of the cancer. And then there are the low-monitoring seekers who want enough information to feel educated and 'in the know' so to speak when dealing with doctors. Their conclusions were that information seeking is based on the individual and not on demographic information. That is to say that just because a person was in a certain age group did not mean that they necessarily would or would not seek information; rather, the need to seek information depended on the type of person they were and their past experiences.

This relates to my topic of interest because it shows that people are more than just demographics; every person has valuable life experiences that affect their information seeking behavior. For the information professional, this makes it very difficult to design systems because you have no real target audience, so to speak.

I really enjoy reading the person view of research. In most of our classes we discuss things from a systems perspective (taken the user into account when possible); but it is refreshing to learn about what the people using the system think or how and why they even use our information systems to find information.