Information Seeking Behavior

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Information Seeking Behavior

• LIS 510

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Introduction

• Every day we are deluged by data
• It is received through our five senses, which are
  continuously at work
• Wide variety of input sources
• Written material (hard copy and electronic)
• Auditory (speech, radio, CDs, etc.)
• Imagery (photographs, graphs, etc.)
• Video (TV, movies, etc.)

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Information Overload

• The greatest problem of today is how to teach
  people to ignore the irrelevant, how to refuse to
  know things, before they are suffocated. For too
  many facts are as bad as none at all. (W.H.
  Auden)

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Information Theory

• Claude Shannon, 1940s, studying communication
• Ways to measure information
• Communication producing the same message at its
  destination as that seen at its source
• Problem a noisy channel can distort the
  message
• Between transmitter and receiver, the message
  must be encoded
• Semantic aspects are irrelevant

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Information Theory

• Better called Communication Theory
• Communication may be over time and space

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What kinds of information are there?

• Text
• books, periodicals, WWW, memos, ads
• published/refeered
• Film
• Photos, other Images
• Broadcast TV, Radio
• Telephone Conversations
• Databases

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How much information is there?
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How Much Information?

• Stored Information
• Print
• Film
• Optical
• Magnetic

• Communicated
• Internet
• Broadcast
• Phone
• Mail

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Print

• Annual Production
• Books 968,735 8 Terabytes (compressed
  image)
• Newspapers 22643 25 Terabytes
• Journals 40000 2 Terabytes
• Magazines 80000 10 Terabytes
• Office Documents 12x109 pages 312 Terabytes
• TOTAL 357 Terabytes (1824 scanned, 35 text)

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Print

• Library of Congress Printed book collection
• About 18 Million books
• About 130 Terabytes (compressed image)
• For all of LC we should also assume
• 13M photographs, 5MB each 65 TB
• 4M maps, say 200 TB
• 500K files, 1GB each 500 TB
• 3.5M sound recordings, 2000 TB
• Grand total 3 petabytes (3000 terabytes)
• Books in Print
• 3.2 Million titles
• About 26 Terabytes

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Film and Image

• Film
• Photographs 410 Petabytes per year
• Movies 16 Terabytes (Commercial Production of
  about 4000 films)
• X-Rays 12 Petabytes

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Optical Media

• CD-Music 90,000 items 58 TB
• CD-ROM 3,000 items 3 TB
• DVD-Video 5,000 items 22 TB
• Total 83 TB

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Magnetic Media

• Audio Tape 184,200,000 184.2 Petabytes
• Video Tape 355,000,000 1420
• Floppy disks 0.07
• Removable disks 1.69
• Hard Disks 500

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Medium Type of content Terabytes/Year
Terabytes/Year
Upper Bound Lower Bound Paper
Books
8 7
Newspapers 25
20 Periodicals
12 12
Office documents 312
312 SUBTOTAL
357 351 Film
Photographs 410,000
100,000 Cinema
16 16
X-Rays 12,000
12,000 SUBTOTAL
422,000 112,016 Optical
Music CDs 58
40 Data CDs
3 3
DVDs
22 22
SUBTOTAL 83
65 Magnetic Camcorder
300,000 300,000
Disk drives 2,555,000
1,000,20 SUBTOTAL
2,855,000 1,300,200 TOTAL
3,277,440
1,412,632
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Current Size of Web

• There are an estimated 2.1 Billion pages on the
  Web
• About 21 Terabytes
• About 7500 further Terabytes in web-accessed DBs.
• 610 Billion email messages per year 11285 TB
• Internet Traffic is doubling every 100 days - An
  estimated 62 Million Americans now use the
  internet Radio took 38 years to get 50 M
  listeners, TV took 13 years, the Net took 4
  years...

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Internet Hosts 1989-2005
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Projected Voice and Data Traffic
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Language Distribution of Web Content
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Language Distribution on a 634 Million Web Pages
Corpus
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Human Memory

• Landauer 86 Human brain holds 200MB
• looked at rate of information intake and rate of
  forgetting, and amount of information adults need
  for normal tasks
• 6B people on earth implies total memory of all
  people alive about 1,200 petabytes
• Another way
• estimate that people take in a byte/sec
• lifetime 250,000 days or 2B sec
• result is 2 GB (doesnt count synthesizing new
  info)

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Data and Information

• These two terms are quite often used
  interchangeably
• used without any definitions or explanation
• There are no standard definitions for these two
  terms
• Two possible definitions

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Data and Information (cont.)

• Data
• items such as text, facts, numbers, images or
  sounds that may or may not be useful for a
  particular purpose
• Information
• data which has been processed so that its form
  and content are appropriate for a particular
  purpose

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Intuitive Notion

• Information must
• Be something, although the exact nature
  (substance, energy, or abstract concept) is not
  clear
• Be new repetition of previously received
  messages is not informative
• Be true false or counterfactual information is
  mis-information
• Be about something
• This human-centered approach emphasizes meaning
  and use of message

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Knowledge

• Quite often the terms information and knowledge
  are used interchangeably
• One possible definition of knowledge
• a combination of information, instincts, rules,
  ideas, procedures and experience that guide
  actions and decisions

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Knowledge (cont.)

• Two types of knowledge
• Tacit
• also called implicit, private or personal
  knowledge
• knowledge held by an individual may not have
  been articulated or may not be articulatable
• For example, how does Michael Jordan accomplish
  his slam dunks

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Knowledge (cont.)

• Explicit
• also called public or social knowledge
• expressed in a form that makes it available to
  others
• usually in a written form, but may be in other
  forms such as verbal

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Continuum

• Quite often data, information and knowledge are
  expressed as a continuum
• Data gt Information gt Knowledge

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Pyramid

• Data, information and knowledge are also depicted
  as a pyramid
• a distillation occurs as we move up the pyramid
• data is raw material
• as data is processed, information is distilled
  from it and the resulting amount is smaller in
  size the same result is experienced in going
  from information to knowledge

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Wisdom

• Long term goal should be the acquisition of
  wisdom
• but there is not much discussion in the
  literature or in the media
• The current situation was aptly described by T.S.
  Eliot
• Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
  Where is the knowledge we have lost in
  information?

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Wisdom (cont.)

• Wisdom connotes the ability to acquire and use
  knowledge and information judiciously, possessing
  the power of judging rightly and following the
  soundest course of action based on knowledge,
  skill, experience and understanding.

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Information Hierarchy

• Data
• The raw material of information
• Information
• Data organized and presented by someone
• Knowledge
• Information read, heard or seen and understood
• Wisdom
• Distilled and integrated knowledge and
  understanding

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What is Data?

• Represented by shapes or symbols that require
  cognitive skill to decipher
• May not provide a context to fully understand its
  meaning

• e.g.
• 10,000,000
• 5,000,000

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What is Information?

• Involves process of reception, recognition and
  conversion
• May involve a novelty factor--a new piece of
  data
• May have multiple interpretations resulting in
  public and private information

• e.g.
• Joe won
• 10,000,000 in the lottery last year and
  5,000,000 more this year.

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What is Knowledge?

• Is created/acquired from a collection of
  information
• Knowledge builds on a foundation of accurate
  information and can be passed on to others

• e.g.
• Joe has been paying a lot of taxes because of
  his lottery winnings and the brand new mansion he
  bought.

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What is Wisdom/Insight?

• Represents highest level of complexity in chain
  of concepts
• Difficult to impart via a storage medium
• Argued to exist only within an individual

• e.g.
• He who has money has friends.

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Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where
is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is
the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T.S. Eliot, The Rock
Where is the information we have lost in data?
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Whom Do People Ask for Information?

• People immediately present
• People they know
• People they trust
• Gatekeepers
• People in authority generally
• People with cognitive authority
• Teachers
• Librarians

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How Do People Ask for Information?

• At the moment of need
• By the easiest available route
• By what they expect will give them the most
  suitable answer
• By what they expect will give them the most
  accessible answer

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Information and People

• Information reinforces social bonds
• People exchange familiar information
• People continue to believe erroneous information
• People say they value information (more than they
  use it)
• People want a known available source

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Limits to Information

• People do not want information that will upset
  them
• People do not want information that might upset
  them
• People do not want more information than they can
  store
• People do not want more information than they can
  process
• People must eventually stop getting information
  and act on what they know

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Dangers of Information

• Information might be erroneous
• Information might be deliberately misleading
• Information might be contradictory
• Information might be so excessive as to paralyze
  action
• Information may cost more than its worth
• Relying on authority may be better than
  information
• Possessing information may make one a too
  conspicuous social figure
• Possessing information may make one a challenge
  to authority

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Storing Information

• People do not want more information than they can
  store
• Immediate storage
• Short and long term memory
• Active knowledge
• People need more information than they can store
  immediately
• At hand
• In the library
• On the web

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Information Wants and Needs

• What people truly need
• What people recognize they need
• What people are willing to admit they need
• What people truly want now
• What people think they want now
• What people say they want now

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The Standard Retrieval Interaction Model
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Standard Model Assumptions

• Maximizing precision and recall simultaneously
• The information need remains static
• The value is the resulting document set

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Problems with Standard Model

• Users learn during the search process
• Scanning titles of retrieved documents
• Reading retrieved documents
• Viewing lists of related topics
• Navigating hyperlinks
• Some users dont like long disorganized lists of
  documents

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Berry-Picking as an Information Seeking Strategy

• Standard IR model
• Assumes the information need remains the same
  throughout the search process
• Berry-picking model
• Interesting information is scattered like berries
  among bushes
• The query is continually shifting

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Berry-Picking Model (cont.)

• The query is continually shifting
• New information may yield new ideas and new
  directions
• The information need
• Is not satisfied by a single, final retrieved set
• Is satisfied by a series of selections and bits
  of information found along the way

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Systems View (cont.)

• Data enters the system and are converted into
  information through a process of formatting,
  filtering and summarizing.
• knowledge is used to determine how to format,
  filter and summarize data
• Guided by knowledge, the resulting information is
  interpreted
• this leads to decisions and actions

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Systems View (cont.)

• The actions generate results.
• Comparison of actions and results helps
  accumulate new knowledge
• this improves the process of interpreting
  information, making decisions and taking new
  actions.

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The information search process

• the users constructive activity of finding
  meaning from information in order to extend his
  or her state of knowledge
• the process of sense-making within a
  personal frame of reference

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The user and information-seeking behavior

• There is a long history of studying human
  behavior in seeking and using information
• Systems-oriented studies and information-as-objec
  t-oriented systems
• User-oriented studies and user-oriented systems

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Systems orientation

• Information is viewed as
• an external objective entity
• having a content-based reality
• existing independently of users or social systems.

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User-centered

• Information is viewed as
• a subjective construction
• that is created internally in the minds of the
  users
• User orientation
• Users, looking for information to aid problem
  solving and decision-making, have inadequacies in
  their state of knowledge - gaps or uncertainties
• sometimes they know what they need to find out
  sometimes they dont

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User-centered (cont.)

• Information systems should be designed to assist
  users in discovering and representing their
  knowledge of a problem situation
• User model
• A general user model of information seeking
  behavior must encompass both the user and his
  context, i,e., the information behavior of the
  user and the environment in which this
  behavior occurs.

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Information Behavior

• Information needs
• Information seeking
• Information use

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Dervins Sense-Making Model

• Dervins sense-making model focuses on the users
  cognitive needs
• the user moves through space and time
• making sense of his/her actions, the environment
  and the information systems inputs
• As long as everything is meaningful,
  movement ahead is possible.

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Dervins Sense-Making Model

• But, movement ahead may be blocked by stops or
  cognitive gaps
• And user must define the nature of the gap or
  the cause of the stop
• Based on users assessment, he selects tactics
  and information to bridge the gap.

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Kuhlthaus model

• Distinguished stages in the information search
  and use process -each stage characterized by the
  users behavior in three realms of experience
• the affective (feelings)
• the cognitive (thought)
• the physical (action)

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Kuhlthaus model (cont.)

• Six stages of the information search
  process
• initiation
• selection
• exploration
• formulation
• collection
• presentation

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Communication between the user and the
information retrieval system

• each has its own language (concepts vs. symbols)
• user must translate his information need
  into one the information system will
  understand OR
• the information system must interpret the
  information need of the user and translate the
  users request into one that the system can
  process

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How is this communication accomplished?

• Different ways of searching
• controlled vocabulary
• natural language

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Information ecology

• User behavior and user environments
• part of what Davenport calls the information
  ecology of an organization
• internal environments and
• external environments

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Information ecology (Davenport)

• Davenport views an information ecology as
  encompassing six components
• Information strategy
• Information politics
• Information behavior and culture
• Information staff
• Information processes (use)
• Information architecture

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Information Systems

• An information system is a combination of work
  practices, information, people, and information
  technology organized to accomplish goals in an
  organization
• goals are actually outside the information system

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Forms of Information Systems

• database systems
• information storage and retrieval systems
• transaction processing systems
• management information systems
• decision support systems
• knowledge management systems

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Components of information systems

• Work practices
• Information
• People
• Information technology

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Information Life Cycle

• A useful way to envision information is in terms
  of its life cycle
• the life cycle identifies the phases through
  which information passes from creation to final
  disposition
• Life cycle phases
• Creating (Authoring)
• Distribution (Networking)

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Information Life Cycle (cont.)

• Life cycle phases (cont.)
• Use
• Organizing/Indexing
• Storing/Retrieving
• Accessing/Retrieving
• Reusing/Modifying
• Disposition