Recently I researched “information-seeking behaviour” for an assignment and what I learned about myself was pretty eye-opening.
When I first started uni and was doing research, my mum told me about how she used to research. She would go to the library, browse the shelves, pick out what she thought might be relevant and then delved deep into the texts to see what was there. My naive brain thought, “oh it’s the exact same now, except you browse online.” Wow was I wrong!!
We live in a world of efficiency and production. Because of the Internet, the volume of information has exploded but the amount of time we have has stayed the same. Most of the research I read on information-seeking emphasised how students today tend to “search, save and read later” (Dunne 2016, p. 420). I found I was doing this unconsciously to cope with the sheer number of sources there are. When you search “world war two” into a discovery layer and get back hundreds of thousands of results, it can feel quite daunting – like looking for a needle in a haystack.
According to the literature, this kind of situation typically leads to skim reading and quick relevancy judgements. When I first read this, I thought about how I search. Usually I enter a few keywords and then just scroll until something catches my eye. I open it in a new tab so I don’t lose it, then I keep scrolling or try a different search. Later on, once I’ve opened thirty tabs of sources, I go through each one, skim the abstract and make a quick relevancy judgement. Quick, methodical, efficient.
But is this the best way to research? Do quick relevancy judgements mean that good sources will be discounted while less authoritative ones will be counted? Will the emphasis on efficiency foster organic discovery? Do discovery layers actually allow for discovery and exploration without a certain topic in mind? Perhaps yes. After all, I thought that when I entered some keywords into a discovery layer that I was ‘browsing.’ But now I’m not so sure. Maybe this is actually specific searching.
So what is the future of information-seeking? I don’t know, but I think it’s important to think about! Information-seeking is one of the foundations of research after all.
Once, we flipped through physical pages. Now, we scroll past hundreds of sources, and we flip through browser tabs. Endless. Browser. Tabs.
But you know what’s great? When you submit your assignment and can close all those tabs.
References:
Dunne, S 2016, ‘How Do They Research? An Ethnographic Study of Final Year Undergraduate Research Behavior in an Irish University’, New Review of Academic Librarianship, vol. 22, pp. 410-429.
Gunter, B, Rowlands, I & Nicholas, D 2009, ‘Emergence of new forms of knowledge production, search and acquisition’, in The Google Generation: are ICT innovations changing information-seeking, Chandos Publishing, Oxford, pp.93-122.