Research and Information Retrieval Among Academic Researchers: Implications for Library Instruction
Stephen K. Stoan · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1991
THEQUESTION OF LIBRARY instruction for faculty is linked to the issue of whether they use the library effectively in carrying on their research.Librarian-generated studies have tended to concentrate exclusively on the frequency of use of reference sources-principally abstracting and indexing systems-largely ignoring the broader intellectual and social context in which scholars function as information-generating and information-seeking individuals.Nonlibrarian researchers have been principally interested in the overall communication processes within the research community analyzed as a social system.Both bodies of literature are generally agreed that researchers do most of their information gathering using a variety of informal techniques that cause them to bypass the formal apparatus of the secondary literature or consult it only on occasion.A third body of literature that has sought to analyze the effectiveness of indexing systems has generally concluded that, for scholarly purposes, they leave much to be desired.They are incapable of incorporating the perspectival dimension needed by the scholar seeking to do original or creative work in a field.One can therefore make a strong case that the information-seeking behavior of scholars is both logical and successful given the nature of the intellectual work they are doing and the limitations of the access literature.The most extensive efforts at education have thus far failed to bring about a change in the behavior of researchers and are unlikely to do so in the future.