INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIOR OF CATALOG USERS

Summary-This study is based on the data from a survey of catalog use at three university libraries and one public library. Both “known-item” searches and “subject” searches were analyzed. The characteristics of the user population were examined and methodological problems of the survey were discussed. A relation was found between the academic rank of the catalog users and type of search that they carry out. Some of the factors influencing the success or failure of the search were analyzed, and the meaning of “success” for the two types of search was discussed. The study investigated trends in search strategies as well as degree of perseverance of catalog searchers. Implications for the design of modern information retrieval systems were pointed out. IT SEEMS likely that future generations of scientists, scholars, technologists, and students will make use of partially automated information and education systems. When this happens, new skills, attitudes and habits will emerge in response to the change in technology. Though many would agree that the manipulative acts required to use automated information retrieval systems may be different from those required to use traditional information systems, almost everybody seems to accept the assumption that the same basic cognitive processes are involved in both cases. [s this assumption justified? Do we know so well, and can we describe so precisely, the information-seeking behavior of people, that we can assert that this behavior will remain basically the same, even when the information systems have changed ? Or, if we do admit that there will be a change in behavior, can we predict in which directions it will occur? These general questions are part of the context of the present study. The future users of automated information retrieval systems will be people who, for at least a part of their lives, have had recourse to libraries whenever the need to gain information not available in their immediate surroundings arose. (We will not consider here the hypothetical case of individuals born into a culture in which libraries, as we know them, no longer exist.) Any innovative information technology [l] will have to deal with the information-seeking behavior of these individuals. Studies of the actual use of existing libraries or other forms of traditional information systems, while helping us to improve the information systems of the present, will lay the foundations for the automated systems of the future. The study that we are reporting concerns that aspect of information-seeking behavior which has to do with searching through a directory. It arose out of our concern with principles of directory design and was part of a project for learning to design a “growing encyclopedia system” [2]. Instead of creating an experimental directory, we chose, as a source of data, the library catalog-a ready-made, universally used directory. Other forms of directory, such as a subject index, a telephone book, a guide, an encyclopedia, could as well have served the purpose. Three of the libraries where our study was carried out are part of the University of Michigan Library System. The fourth library is the Ann Arbor