Information Technology Reference
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7.4 Information Seeking Behavior
The other main area where human-computer communication has made significant
contributions is where users are seeking information. This can be regarded as an
information retrieval problem—finding the information—but we consider human
information behavior to be slightly broader. Here we focus mostly on the ubiquitous
task of searching for information on the web, but the concepts we discuss can be
generalized to other tasks, such as searching for information on a hard drive (which
routinely have capacities of over 1 TB nowadays) and in help systems and intranets.
7.4.1 Information
Information appears to many to be an elusive concept that is hard to define but, like
the Supreme Court justice said, ''…we know it when we see it.'' In general, though,
information can be thought of as organized data. The extension of this is that
knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom can be considered as organized information. It is
also important to take into consideration the need for an entity to process the
information, and the context, which can influence how the information is interpreted.
7.4.2 Human Information Behavior
Human information behavior is working with information. The ways that people
work with information depends on several factors including the context in which
they interact with information, which is sometime described as an information
journey (Blandford and Attfield 2010 ).
Broadly defined, human information behavior includes problem solving, but a
more typical task is searching for information. Human information behavior thus
includes how users process, use, and produce information. How users interact to
get information, and their strategies and tactics for handling information can
therefore also be seen as human information behavior. So, for example, the content
of this topic could have been cast as a summary of human information behavior if
it had been designed for a different target audience.
We know that users have inherent capabilities and limitations, and these con-
strain human information behavior. How users can process information is deter-
mined by their cognitive, perceptual, and motor capabilities, that is, their
information processing architecture. There are other, external constraints too, such
as the tools that they use to access and process the information: their databases,
their interfaces, networks, and other forms of information delivery, presentation,
and output capabilities. By some measures, the largest information processor in
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