ACURIL: Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries. XXV Conference, 1995, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Information-seeking Behaviour:
Designing Information Systems
to meet our Clients' Needs.

Professor Tom Wilson
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield

Introduction

That we should understand the needs of our clients in order to deliver effective information services is such an obvious statement that it is almost embarrassing to make it. However, general observation, the reports of students who have been subject to the vagaries of university library systems, and consultancy work in organizations have convinced me that it is a statement well worth repeating. Merely repeating the statement, however, is not of very much assistance to librarians and information workers who are subject, increasingly, to demands for more cost-effective (i.e., cheaper) services, and to demands for greater relevance of their work to the needs of the organization. In addition to rhetoric, they need help - help to understand the nature of information needs, how those needs are generated by the work that people do in organizations, the behaviour involved in gaining access to the needed information, and the role of formal library and information services in delivering the information. This paper is an attempt to provide some guidance - in so far as that is possible in the course of a conference paper.

The term 'information need' has been a troublesome one: writers have debated the difference between 'needs' and 'wants', between 'perceived needs' and 'expressed needs', and so on; and, of course, librarians and information workers have always been willing to decide that they know what the user needs, better than the user. However, very little emerges from this debate to guide our actions - in the end, we have to try to anticipate demands upon our services and, therefore, we have to act as if we understand the needs of the information user.

Some guidance through the fog of information needs is possible if we understand the nature of the organizations we work in, if we acknowledge that the organization itself (in terms of its goals and objectives) has needs for information; and if we understand that personal needs arise out of the roles people undertake in organizations.

Information Need

The nature of organizations

The first point to be made is that all organizations are information and communication systems: some more so than others, of course. For example, a media company, such as a newspaper, deals almost entirely in terms of information flows (from the wire services and from its own journalists and other writers) and the subsequent organization and re-presentation of that information. A bureaucracy, such as a government department, is also almost entirely an information processing and communication organization: everything is document, records and files abound, filing systems and records management are central to the organization. Even a manufacturing company is mainly concerned, at head office level, with the information flows about production and market performance.

The question for the information manager or librarian, therefore, is not whether information is important in the organization, but how information intensive are its operations

Organizational information needs

If we accept the information-processing model of organizations it follows that organizations will have information needs, if they are to satisfy their goals and objectives. Recently, I have been exploring the use of Porter's model of the 'value chain' in identifying the information-critical areas on an organization's activity. This model suggests that different areas of the value chain will be of greater or lesser importance to a company and that, consequently, information will have different levels of importance.

One example is the pharmaceutical industry: clearly, except for companies that manufacture only generic drugs (which are those for which the patents have run out), the research and development function is critical - conse quently, all such companies have major information services departments, as well as well-defined procedures for drug testing and registration. In another case, the publishing industry, one of my Ph.D. students has determined that the marketing function is the most critical area of the value chain, but that the information consequences of this have not been understood by the organiz ation itself.

So - value chain analysis of your organization is one way to identify where the information needs are most likely to lie and, most importantly, where your efforts can be of maximum benefit to the organization.

Work in the organization

We also need to understand the work that people do in the organizations we serve. Many years ago, when I worked in an industrial research organization as an information manager, the Director of the organization told me that he expected me to spend 25-30% of my time walking around the laboratories, talking to people, discovering what they were doing and understanding the nature of their work.

"Walking the organization" is a well-practised management strategy for finding out what is going on, but I know few librarians who practice it and fewer still who require their staffs to practice it. Most stay metaphorically chained to their desks and are reluctant get out and about in this way, in case they are viewed as wasting their time. Instead, they ask about ways of finding out about users needs through questionnaire design and surveys, or through analysing departmental records of information use.

Such tools are useful, but, in my opinion, they are no real substitute for getting out and talking to people.

Once you do get out, what are you likely to find? Many things: you should already know how the organization is structured and what it does, in general terms. You might also know of its overall strategy, whether it is a public sector strategy, or a private sector strategy - you should know what it is trying to do. And, if you don't, finding someone to ask is a good place to start.

Observing what is going on, however, and talking to people about their work, will reveal a great deal more: how much work is done at the desk, how much at meetings, how much outside the organization. How information is brought into the workplace (other than through your information service), what external links to information sources exist and how they are used; what current problems exist in the department or section, or in the individual's work and those problems are being tackled. Perhaps, in these conversations, you too will be able to made a contribution - drawing attention to untapped information resources, agreeing to explore the information aspects of a current problem and report back, or simply by knowing, by chance, the answer to a current problem.

Through interaction of this kind you become a "well-informed citizen" of the organization, one who can act as an effective information intermediary - not only between people and information sources, but between one person and another. I once saved the organization I worked for a considerable amount of money by discovering that two people in two different departments were both working on the same problem in complete ignorance of one another's existence - until I provided the link.

Personal information needs

We generally assume that the work people do gives rise to cognitive inform ation needs - that is, a need to fill gaps in knowledge. The knowledge may be trivial - the address of a supplier, for example; or it may be fundamental to a policy issue or a scientific problem - the current number of homeless persons in a local authority area, or a method for analysing a hazardous substance. And this is the kind of information need for which information services are generally set up.

Information needs of this kind can be 'unearthed' during our walks around the organization, or we can discover them in general terms through surveys using standardized lists of topic areas. However, we can also design our systems so that they deliver information about the users and their information choices: for example, automated loans systems can provide a fund of information of this kind; monitoring inter-library loan requests, analysing photocopying forms, in fact regular monitoring of all information system/service activity can provide us with information that raises questions that we can ultimately ask of the user and from which we can derive indicators for future pro-active actions on the part of the information service.

However, information may also be used to satisfy affective or emotional needs. I discovered this some years ago when carrying out research on communication in social welfare departments in the U.K. People have different kinds of affective needs in their jobs: they need to feel competent and assured in their roles; they may feel a need for achievement or ambition; at the more pathological end of the spectrum they may feel a need to dominate and control through the possession of greater knowledge.

These affective needs are more difficult to determine, but they can come to light when probing exactly what it is that a user wants when he or she comes asking for information. The reference interview process is taught as a means of establishing the cognitive aspects of an information request, but we can learn much more about the user and the nature of his or her information needs if we ensure that we ask questions about why the information is needed - and we may sometimes be slightly surprised by the answers.

Information-seeking behaviour

The fact that information needs exist is no guarantee that the person who needs the information will take any action to find that information. This is such an obvious statement that it seems, sometimes, to take librarians by surprise! We are all so accustomed to seeking and using information that we find the idea of not looking for information when we need it quite difficult to understand. However, all kinds of barriers to action exist: from simple inertia on the part of the individual to formal organizational barriers to the free flow of information.

We must also recognize that information-seeking can be understood in two senses: it is a continuous activity in a generic sense, in that we make sense of the world around us by gathering information, but, for specific purposes it is, for the typical organizational member, a highly spasmodic, event-driven phenomenon. And, often, the driving event is a crisis - either for the individual of for the organization. We cannot assume, therefore, that people have well-developed formal information- seeking skills. It is more likely that the process has to be re-learnt on each occasion - particularly if those occasions are widely spaced.

Informal information behaviour

Whatever the field, much research demonstrates that informal information sources are likely to be explored first by the person needing information and that formal information sources, such as libraries, come no higher than second or third on the list and, often, a good way further down.

Partly, this is the result of the fact that organizations are information- processing or communication systems and that personal interaction occurs for all kinds of work-related purposes and is therefore a natural course to take when seeking specific information. Information can also be a medium of exchange relationships: if I give you information when you need it today, you may give it to me when I need it.

Partly, however, it is also due to the spasmodic nature of information need and the probability in an organization that there is someone known to the information searcher who can be relied upon to advise on the answer - can not only direct a seeker to other sources but also comment on the validity, reliability, authenticity etc., of information from those sources - and, most importantly, which information not to trust.

Seeking information from formal sources

When it comes to seeking information from formal sources, such as libraries, a number of things follow from what we know about users' information- seeking behaviour:

the crisis-driven nature of much information need, together with the interrupted nature of much organizational work, means that the user will always need the information right now!
the same two characteristics mean that the user will always fail to allow enough time to locate the information;
because information-seeking is an irregular, spasmodic activity, the user's knowledge of information sources and his/her recollection of how to use them will always be deficient;
because information serves affective as well as cognitive needs, the information seeker may be unwilling to reveal the real reasons for wanting information.

These facts, as well some of the other points I have been making have some fairly obvious consequences for the design and delivery of information services.

Service design and delivery

I think we need to begin by establishing that everyone agrees that service delivery is a design problem: services ought not to happen by chance, or be put together in a haphazard fashion, they ought to be planned and, specifically, they ought to be designed around the needs of the information user and his/her information-seeking behaviour.

We also need to be aware that re-design is necessary from time to time (or, perhaps, given the pace of technological change, continuously), since the organization, its members and its functions change over time.

How, then, can an understanding of the information-user help us to design services? First, we have to understand the nature of the organization we work in and how its functions, aims and goals affect the information needs of the people who work there - in other words, we can begin by identifying organizational information needs. As I have suggested, we can do this by looking at the nature of the value chain for the organization and, thereby, identify the divisions or sections that are most information intensive. We will find, of course, in some organizations, that the information needed for a critical function, is the organization's own information - internal information on, for example, production, sales, or other issues. Whether we believe, as information workers, that we have a role in managing such information is an issue, of course, but - if no one else is doing the job effectively - what is to prevent us from drawing the attention of senior management to the problem and seeking to do something about it?

Having obtained some idea of the needs of the organization, we next need to look at the nature of organizational work and assess the impact of the organization on the information user. Again, as I have suggested, we have a number of things to guide us: we know, for example, that at managerial levels (and remember that management starts low down the structure in many organizations) work is fragmented, subject to frequent interruptions, and that the need for information is often driven by crises of one kind or another. We also know that individuals differ in their propensity to seek information and in their knowledge of how to look for appropriate sources, and, when those sources have been found, how to locate the needed information.

At this personal level, therefore, the information service must be designed with these characteristics in mind. For example: airlines have Frequent Flyer programmes - what about a Frequent User programme for people who know what they want, how to get it and manifest a need for information frequently - a fast access capability equivalent to the quick check in; perhaps, in fully networked systems, personal passwords to external information sources. Or, perhaps, an Infrequent User plan would be more to the point - more personal service for the less well-informed, a personal contact in the library or information service, rather than the anonymous "Information Desk" - which perhaps could be renamed the "Help Desk", in any event.

Thinking of Help Desk's lead's one to consider the application of the computer software or hardware Help Desk - the phone number for the terminally uninformed! Of course, these measures assume that you are able to stratify your users into beginners and advanced classes, but this is what finding out about users' needs and information-seeking behaviour is all about. There is no point in doing it simply out of casual interest - it has to lead somewhere and where it should lead is to the redesign of services around the behavioural characteristics of the users. Those characteristics differ, but they do cluster and services can be designed for categories of persons.

Consider, as another example, the design of information products for your users. Research we carried out in Sheffield some years ago demonstrated that managers and other "desk-bound" people had certain work characteristics in common: for example, most of their "communication events" lasted only three minutes or less before interruption, another task, a visitor, or whatever led to a change of focus. This means that, in many organizations, you have three minutes in which to get your message across through an information publication, such as an information bulletin, for example (on-screen or printed). The design lesson is that you design for brevity - keep it short and keep it simple. E-mail messages with a screenful of new accessions every few days will be better than a monthly printed bulletin.

We also found that meetings were a frequent focus for information exchange and decision making and that the proportion of time spent in meetings increased as one went up the managerial ladder, so that some people could spent two-thirds of their working weeks in meetings. Perhaps, then, the meeting, the working party, or whatever, should be the focus of information delivery, rather than the individual.

Conclusion

I have tried to show that understanding the information user is a) possible, and b) highly relevant to the creation of effective libraries and information services. It is possible because we already understand so much about information needs and the behaviour people engage in to satisfy those needs, and we also know a great deal about how people work. It is also possible because, being in direct contact with the user, and having the capability to interact to an even greater degree, the librarian or information manager has in his/her own hands the capacity to discover more.

It is relevant because creating effective information services demands knowledge of these matters - if we fail to understand users' needs and if we fail to understand the processes of satisfying those needs, information services will be ad hoc, unsatisfactory and, eventually, ignored by the information user - when that happens the information worker had better start looking for a new job because the old one is not going to last much longer!