Competency J

Describe the fundamental concepts of information-seeking behaviors and how they should be considered when connecting individuals or groups with accurate, relevant and appropriate information.

Section 1: Introduction

Theories of information-seeking behavior describe how people recognize, pursue, evaluate, and make sense of information. At its center is the information need: the gap between what a person knows and what they need to know. Brenda Dervin’s (1983) Sense-Making theory offers a useful framework for understanding this gap. Dervin uses a situation-gap-use metaphor: a person in a particular situation encounters a gap in their understanding that prevents them from moving forward, and seeks information to bridge that gap and progress towards a desired outcome. This gap, and therefore the information need, is defined by the seeker’s own perspective and circumstances, not by any external standard of what information is relevant. When doing reference work, Dervin’s framework entails that an information professional must understand the situation and the gap as the seeker experiences them, rather than assuming that a seeker’s information need can be inferred from the explicit content of their question.

Information searching involves interacting with information systems, an often nonlinear process of pursuing an information need over time. Kuhlthau’s (1991) Information Search Process describes search as a cognitive and affective journey with distinct stages: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation. Central to this model is the recognition that uncertainty is not a failure of the search process but an expected and even productive phase within it, particularly during the exploration stage, when a searcher can encounter information that clarifies and reshapes the information need.

Search tactics, by contrast, are the specific strategies used to make searches more effective once a need has begun to take shape. Bates (1979) describes the CUT tactic as a strategy designed to remove the largest possible portion of a search space in one move by selecting the most discriminating search term. For example, one could begin a search with the least common author name or keyword involved in one’s query. This and other search strategies, including pearl growing (using a highly relevant source to discover unthought-of keywords, subject headings, and terminology), citation chaining (using citations to trace the development of a topic or locate influential research), and Boolean operators (using AND, OR, and NOT between terms to broaden or narrow searches) were already intuitively familiar to me from past experience with academic research. Seeing them described explicitly in my course readings, however, helped me to better understand how I can apply them not just to my own information seeking, but that of my clients. Bates’ (1989) later berrypicking model extends this thinking to describe real-world searching more holistically: an evolving, feedback-driven process in which each piece of retrieved information reshapes the searcher’s understanding and prompts new search avenues.

Adapting to ongoing changes in searchers’ understandings is especially vital in reference and user-facing contexts, where seekers routinely struggle to articulate unformed needs. Brown (2021) explains that open-ended questioning during a reference interview allows information professionals to discover hidden context, constraints, and priority preferences, as I discovered in one of the projects described below. A client’s initial inability to articulate what they want is a normal, even necessary step preceding the formulation of a focused query. Recognizing this has taught me to give clients room to explore uncertainty, rather than immediately pushing for more specific information.

Searchers may not know what they need until they begin to encounter relevant materials. This has practical consequences for service design: search interfaces, reference desks, and instructional materials all function better when they accommodate browsing, revision, clarification, and iterative discovery. As a result of considering the information needs of clients and the theories behind information seeking, I have started to approach research as an ongoing interaction between the person seeking information, the resources available to them, and the discoveries they make along the way.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of information-seeking behavior comes from a combination of reflective analysis of my own search process, direct experience conducting reference interviews with a real client, and hands-on instructional work teaching search strategy to others.

My first piece of evidence is a search exercise from INFO 244, in which I answered several reference and search questions using the database platform Dialog. It demonstrates two distinct information-seeking skills. In question 4, I conducted a known-item search for a specific article with limited starting information, and reflected afterward on my search choices using Bates’ (1979) concept of the CUT tactic. I recognized in hindsight that a more specific term drawn from the article’s abstract, or its exact publication date, would have eliminated far more irrelevant results than the broader keyword I initially used. Effective searching depends on developing the judgment to recognize which available facts about an information need are most discriminating.

In question 3, I conducted a simulated reference interaction, helping a faculty member locate an article they could only partially recall, involving adult learners’ “perceived interactivity” and “perceived added value” in online education. Viewed through Dervin’s sense-making framework, the faculty member’s situation was that they remembered the general concepts but not the publication itself. The gap was the missing citation, widened by the difference between their phrasing and the terminology used by professional indexers. I built the bridge from broader concepts (adult learners, online learning, and a truncated form of “interact*”) and applied the reliable details given in the scenario: scholarly journals published within the last two years. The article I ultimately selected expressed the faculty member’s ideas in different terms. Its abstract used “social connectedness” and “academic perseverance,” and its indexing used “Interaction,” “Academic Persistence,” and “Student Satisfaction,” which corresponded to the faculty member’s ideas of interactivity, sustained participation, and satisfaction, while its discussion of peer connection matched “perceived added value.” A search on only the faculty member’s exact phrases would very likely have missed it.

My second piece of evidence is a client-facing research project from INFO 244, in which I conducted repeated reference interviews and searches for a real client working in digital marketing. I began with an open-ended reference interview, a technique recommended by Brown (2021), asking my client to describe his company’s processes, priorities, and needs in his own words. This reflects what Kuhlthau (1991) calls the initiation stage, in which a seeker recognizes a gap in their knowledge but may not yet be able to articulate it precisely. The conversation revealed considerations I hadn’t anticipated, including the fact that his company’s outreach was legally constrained by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule, and that a lead’s value depended on non-obvious signals like how recently a business had been listed in an online directory.

As I began searching and discussing potential sources with him, we encountered the uncertainty and expanding possibilities characteristic of Kuhlthau’s exploration stage. His initial request became more specific as we examined what kinds of information would actually support his company’s goals. Through repeated rounds of searching and feedback, his information need gradually moved toward the formulation stage, in which a clearer perspective emerges and provides a more focused basis for searching. By the later stages of the project, his feedback allowed me to conduct increasingly targeted searches based on specific requirements, moving toward Kuhlthau’s collection stage, where information is gathered in response to a more clearly defined need.

As I began searching and discussing potential sources with him, we encountered the uncertainty and expanding possibilities characteristic of Kuhlthau’s exploration stage. Through repeated rounds of searching and feedback, his request became more specific and moved toward the formulation stage, allowing increasingly targeted searches by the later collection stage. His feedback on each round also required me to evaluate whether the information was relevant to his actual purpose. For example, when he noted that certain data sources were not updating quickly enough to keep pace with his competitors, I returned to a promising article and used a phrase from it, describing a competitor’s real-time data verification process, as the seed for an entirely new search: an instance of pearl growing. More broadly, this process mirrors what Bates (1989) describes as berrypicking: rather than following a single predetermined query toward a fixed destination, the search evolved as each discovery changed the client’s understanding of what information was useful. These models have helped me recognize that connecting a client with accurate information involves locating authoritative and appropriate sources, but also understanding how the client’s information need develops over time.

My third piece of evidence is an instructional video I created for INFO 244, teaching a viewer how to search using thesaurus terms and controlled vocabulary. I modeled my own search reasoning aloud, including a search that initially returned zero results, and walked through how I diagnosed and corrected the problem by adjusting my search terms. This illustrates Kuhlthau’s (1991) point that uncertainty and failed attempts are a normal part of the search process, rather than a sign of poor searching. It also shows that effective information seeking requires interpreting what the presence or absence of results reveals about the search strategy and how well it aligns with the information system being used. Given that online searching can be intimidating, I believe novice searchers benefit from watching an experienced searcher recognize and fix a problem rather than only seeing a clean, successful result, which may not match their own initial experiences.

My fourth piece of evidence is a comparative research paper from INFO 256, in which I evaluated six archival search interfaces by conducting the same search query across each one. This project showed me how much interface design shapes information-seeking behavior: the same underlying need required different strategies on each platform, depending on its capabilities. When a date-range search on one platform returned an unmanageably large result set, I combined it with subject-heading filters to narrow the results, while on another platform lacking Boolean search capability, I had to run separate searches for synonymous terms. Platforms also differed in whether they supported controlled vocabulary lookup, meaning that searchers unfamiliar with an archive’s indexing terms could easily miss relevant materials on some platforms but not others. These experiences helped me understand why effective information services must account for the ways interface capabilities can enable or constrain how people search.

Section 3: Conclusion

These four pieces of evidence reflect a consistent understanding of information seeking as an iterative, adaptive process rather than a single, fixed technique. Across different contexts, I have learned that it is rare for a single query, no matter how well constructed, to fully capture a person’s actual information need on the first attempt. Effective information seeking depends on a willingness to repeatedly revise and reformulate one’s strategies, and the process is shaped not only by the searcher’s skills and understanding, but by the tools and systems through which searching takes place.

As a future information professional, I will approach reference and research interactions as collaborative processes: I will use open-ended questioning to understand the context behind a person’s initial request, adapt search strategies as their information need develops, and consider how the design and limitations of information systems may affect what they are able to find. To remain current in this area, I will use the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA)’s Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers to guide my interactions with searchers, the Society of American Archivists (SAA)’s Standards Portal to understand how description affects discovery, the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology for current research on information-seeking behavior, and WebJunction’s tools and webinars on reference. These resources will help me continue connecting people with information in ways that account not only for its accuracy, relevance, and appropriateness, but also for users’ actual needs, search behavior, and ability to navigate the systems through which that information is provided.