There is now quite a family of New Reviews; by my reckoning this is the ninth. Soon they will between them cover many of the most important areas in librarianship and information science. This one is devoted to research into information behaviour, a field that has changed and grown steadily since the 1960s. The subtitle is actually wrong, since this volume includes papers on information use and processing by people, not merely information seeking (and for that matter not always in context). It was used presumably because the papers therein all originated in ISIC III, the third biennial International Conference on Information Seeking in Context; the first two conferences have already been published as separate volumes. More papers from ISIC III are to appear in the second volume of this New Review, which looks as if it may be no more than a vehicle for ISIC conference papers: I hope this is not so.
A helpful leaflet (the text of which might usefully have been included in the volume) states that the New Review “is designed to address the perceived shortcomings of many previous information needs studies – which were often systems‐centred rather than person‐centred, which conceptualised information as an objective entity with constant meaning, which concentrated on external behaviour to the neglect of internal cognition, which tended to ignore the larger contexts of the lives of information users, and which produced over‐rigid models to predict information behaviour”. To summarise, the digestive systems of individuals are as important as the information fed to them.
“Context” can be either theoretical or conceptual (there are inter alia psychological, anthropological and sociological contexts), or work. The former are exemplified in the first six papers, including a most interesting and useful one by Chatman entitled “Framing social life in theory and research”, which covers a lot of ground in a few pages and raises several important issues; she makes two sets of “propositional statements”, and concludes with a statement of what a general theory of information seeking would look like. Hjørland also addresses the question of a general theory.
A topic that currently interests me, in my efforts to lead discussions with intelligent people on such matters as crime and punishment and child poverty, is why people do not seek information on particular matters when they are fully prepared to make utterances on them, or when they reject information when it is given. Chatman and Hjørland say rightly that “people will not seek information if there is no need to do so” and that they are influenced by perceived benefits and costs, but neither points out that people are often unwilling either to seek information that might upset their prejudices or to accept it when it does; they do not actually need information, but they ought to have it. We know that the same happens with serious researchers in science, and it is almost certainly very common. The phenomena of non‐seeking and rejection of information are surely as much a matter for information science as for psychology – or for both, for overlap between the fields is increasing. A question of similar interest is the insatiable, apparently purposeless, information seeker and user, who seeks information he/she does not need. Are human beings divided into the information‐seeking, the passive information‐accepting, and the information‐averse? (One might add the information‐abusing.) If these are basic types of behaviour, when, why and how are they overriden?
Examples of work context occupy nearly half of this volume; they include studies in law, software design, health care and industry. They are nearly all intensive rather than extensive; some of the samples used are very small, and studies of different people in the same area might have yielded quite different results; if so, I suppose it would prove the point made passim that information behaviour is highly individual, but this makes the design of information systems that much harder. All the studies shed light on general issues as well as on their particular settings. Here I declare another interest, which Fulton in her “The case of the missing information resource” touches on in her research into problems faced by the remote worker, of whom I am now one. One of the information components missed by her teleworkers was “collegial contact”; colleagues are important not only as information sources in themselves, but valuable means of assessing and organising information already received.
The last three papers are said in the Introduction to form a separate category, though I am not wholly clear as to what it is. One is “an ongoing ethnographic study of the information seeking behaviour and relevance judgements of two academic researchers”, one describes a study of information discovered on the Web and its sharing with others, and the third deals with the Collaborative Information Retrieval project, which “examines information seeking as a social and dynamic process”. All three papers are interesting.
This is all a long way from the traditional librarian’s approach, which is that once supposedly relevant information is offered the job is done. The implications of information behaviour research for librarians and the designers of information systems – the limits of their responsibilities, and the way they fulfil them – have not yet been properly explored.
Only a few of the 15 papers have been mentioned here, but that does not imply that the others are of less consequence. Altogether, this is a very satisfying volume. The editors, Lars Höglund and Tom Wilson, have done a generally excellent job. Careful editing is essential in the case of papers by authors whose native language is not English; unfortunately, it has lapsed in Hjørland’s paper, which contains various misprints, infelicities and worse, and looks as if it has not been scrutinised at all, either by the editors or by the publisher’s copy‐editor (who, incidentally, should note that “focused” is spelt like that, not “focussed”, an error that occurs more than once in the volume). Also, oddly, two different line‐spacings are used, though spacing is consistent within papers. Finally, the volume looks somewhat incomplete when the only title page is the front cover and the only list of contents is the back cover; could not two more sheets of paper have been afforded?
To all who are specially concerned with the field of information behaviour, this New Review will surely be essential reading; and it will be (or ought to be?) of interest to many others, since knowledge of information behaviour is important to almost everything that information workers do.
