Information Research, Vol. 10 No. 1, 2004

Trends in information needs research in Russia and Lithuania

Elena Macevičiūtė

Swedish School of Librarianship and Information Science
Högskolan i Borås, Borås, Sweden
and
Faculty of Communication
Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
E-mail: elena.maceviciute@hb.se
Phone: +46 (0)33 435 43 55

The main goal of this note is to present a picture of information needs research conducted during the period of 1965-2002 in Russia and Lithuania.

East European information-related behaviour research falls into several wide areas:

1. studies of reading and readers,
2. information literacy (culture), and
3. information needs

The third research direction on information needs is the youngest: the first publications appeared approximately forty years ago. According to our estimates from 1965 to 2003, 308 items discussing information needs appeared in Russia and sixty-eight in Lithuania. The number of publications during different years was different. The highest peak of publishing occurred in 1990 and 1992. In 1990 a large collection of papers was published by Novosibirsk Department of Academy of Science. It included thirteen papers. In 1992 another collection on information needs in pedagogics and public education was published in Moscow. The other peaks are mainly related to conferences that included papers on information needs.

The main theoretical problems discussed by the authors are:

• the concept and definition of information needs,
• structure of information need,
• typologies of information needs, and
• professional information needs.

Mostly information needs were investigated in relation to the development of information services and systems in the Soviet Union. The research is related to a fundamental concept of a human being as a complex psycho-physiological system formed and acting within complex social system. From the view of information science in Russia, a human being is an information enterprise, processing incoming information and producing information for other human beings.