Melissa Townsend-Crow
Article Review
J_Evidence_3
November 13, 2014
Bates, M. J. (2002). Toward
an integrated model of information seeking and searching. The New Review of Information
Behaviour Research, 3,
1-15.
In
her article, “Toward an Integrated Model of Information Seeking and Searching,”
Marcia Bates examines information seeking behavior in the context of social and
cultural interaction, but she goes beyond that to get a more complete picture. Bates
states that research into information behavior has been primarily focused on
the humanities and social sciences perspective and that enough work has been
done to research information seeking behavior in the area of natural science.
The “integrated” in the title refers to her integration of these perspectives.
Bates emphasizes the anthropological and biological
levels because she says that she believes they have been neglected in previous
research (p 2). She creates a table that shows the interrelationship between the
levels of information perspectives, from Spiritual to Chemical:
(Bates, 3)
The figure
above is intended to show how the levels can be interrelated a step towards
integration.
Bates
goes on to differentiate between information searching and seeking. What I find interesting in this section of the article is that, in the
discussion of information seeking
behavior, passive exposure to
information is rarely, if ever, discussed. As Bates writes,
it
is not unreasonable to guess that we absorb perhaps 80 percent of all our
knowledge through simply being aware, being conscious and sentient in our
social context and physical environment (4).
In her discussion
of searching and seeking, Bates states that the information needs of children
are underserved in research:
It
is one thing to think of children's information needs as the questions they ask
about dinosaurs when they go to the library. It is quite another to see the
full array of learning that must occur for a child to emerge successfully into
adulthood (4).
This
observation may allow librarians to meet needs we may not have realized were
there before. Bates also differentiates between passive and active information
behavior and describes 4 modes:
awareness, monitoring, seeking, and searching. Awareness and monitoring
are the passive modes and seeking and searching, or browsing and directed
searching, are active modes. Awareness and monitoring are, according to
Bates, the way by which most information is acquired by most people (8).
Seeking and searching are deliberate modes by which people seek to fill a
perceived need for or gap in knowledge to achieve an information goal. Taking
both the passive and active modes into consideration allows librarians and
other information professionals to better serve our patrons’ information needs.
The conclusion that Bates draws is that
the default information behavior is passive monitoring and goes on to state
that ,
As
people are generally quite unaware of their usual information seeking
behaviors, they do not even have as a part of their conscious thought the idea
that one needs searching skills and search planning--let alone know of specific
strategies they can follow to find what they want. In that case, it is not
surprising, then, that the methods of access designed by librarians are generally
little used (9).
Bates also mentions
Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, stating that this is a frequent finding in
information behavior research. It would appear that exercising the least
effort, even with suboptimal results, is simply human nature.
Bates concludes her study in this article by re-stating that the
most effective model for researching information seeking behavior is an
integrated one. I found the description of active and passive modes most
interesting. I think that it is material to be further studied and researched,
but it is a start for librarians to find ways that can assist us to better
serve our patrons.
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