Introduction

Information seeking is only one component in the broader concept of information behaviour, which (as we have seen in Chapter 3) includes behaviours such as information avoidance – the converse of information seeking – as well as information evaluation and use. However, it has formed the basis for much work in information behaviour over many years, and it continues to be a major element of study. Indeed, in her review of trends in information behaviour research between 2012 and 2014, Greifeneder (2014) concludes that ‘information seeking is still the major topic of interest’. The following sections introduce some of the major milestones in our understanding of information seeking.

People may seek information in many different ways, using very different strategies, and the choice of strategy made by people and groups may be influenced by many factors. These can relate to their psychological make-up, the nature of their goals, their attitudes and their perceptions, and the context within which they are operating. The present chapter focuses on describing the nature of these strategies. Factors affecting the adoption of particular strategies will be discussed in Chapter 6.

Basic information-seeking processes and activities

A number of writers have proposed simple models of the information-seeking process entailing a cycle of actions, including identification of an information need, formulation of a query to a search tool and inspection of the search results – in the light of which the query may be reformulated, looping into a fresh query. Sutcliffe and Ennis’ (1998) model, for example, consists of four main activities:

Marchionini and White (2007) expand these basic activities to include: