Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists

1
Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists

• Brad Hemminger
• bmh_at_ils.unc.edu
• School of Information and Library Science
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2
How to Study Information Seeking Behavior of
Scientists?

• Survey
• Reach many people
• Address common questions
• Produce lots of feedback for libraries
• Quantitative, models of variance (positivist
  approach)
• Interviews
• In depth coverage of selected groups
  (bioinformatics)
• Use grounded theory and critical incident
  techniques to capture more qualitative,
  contextual experiences
• Develop models of information processing and use

3
Survey--Long Term Plan

• Conduct initial (pilot) study at UNC.
• Develop survey instrument and interview
  methodologies.
• Based on analysis of results of the pilot study
  draft national version, and then get feedback
  from national sites.
• Run national study. Setup so that other sites
  only have to recruit subjects the entire survey
  runs off of UNC website. Hopefully this results
  in large number of sites and participants for
  minimal experimental costs.

4
Survey Sampling Technique

• Census
• Need to be able to reach all members
• Best if can get response from large segment of
  population
• Results in potentially more input from wider
  audiences, especially when having comment type,
  open ended questions
• Subject to bias
• Random sample
• Statistically, generally a better choice
• Higher cost due to follow-up
• Would require significantly more work for our
  design were we expressly do not record any
  identifying info

5
Questions

• Questions were based on
• Prior studies we wished to correlate our results
  with. This is facilitated by authors who have
  published their surveys (in papers as appendix,
  e.g. Brown), and especially to folks who have put
  theirs collections of surveys online, e.g.
  Tenopir). Consider national resource!
• Covering issues that our librarians and LIS
  faculty were concerned about
• Developed during several drafts and review by
  representatives from all libraries on campus.

6
Survey Instrument Choices

• Paper
• Phone
• Email
• Web-based. While these can require more effort
  than anticipated, if the number of survey
  respondents is over several hundred it is
  generally more cost effective. This seemed the
  best choice since our pilot survey was of several
  thousand subjects, and our national survey was
  planned for tens of thousands. Since we have web
  and database expertise we were able to automate
  the process with minimal startup costs.
• Schonlau 2001, Conducting Research Surveys
  via E-mail and the Web.

7
Technical Details

• PHP Surveyor used for web based survey. Other
  common choice at our school for simpler surveys
  is Survey Monkey. PHP Surveyor allowed us to ask
  multi-part questions, and to constrain answers to
  specific format responses.
• PHP Surveyor dumps data directly into mysql
  database.
• Data is cleaned up, then feed into SAS for
  analysis.

8
Contact and Follow-up

• Subjects are university faculty, grad students
  and research staff.
• We approached all science department chairs to
  get support first.
• Contact
• Initial contact was by email giving motivation
  for study, indication of support by deptscampus,
  and link to web-based survey.
• Follow-ups by letter, then two emails
• Flyers in department

9
Analysis

• For the quantitative response variables standard
  descriptive statistics (mean, min, max, standard
  deviation) are computed, and histograms are used
  to visualize the distribution.
• Categorical variables are reported as counts and
  percentages for each category, and displayed as
  frequency tables.

10
Analysis Correlations

• Categorical vs Categorical
• Chi-square
• Categorical vs Quantitative
• Analysis of Variance
• Quantitative vs Quantitative
• Correlation
• Examples are by dept analysis of other features
  age vs preferred interface (Google or Library)

11
Look at Survey

• Review questions
• Cover examples of where we learned better ways to
  do things
• Some hot of the press results

12
Wrap-up and Promotional Message

• Information about national survey
• We will hold an open meeting about the national
  survey immediately following this session, just
  outside
• We are still recruiting sites
• Any and all sites are welcome. Entire survey run
  from UNC sites only need to recruit
  participants.
• For more information see the protocol and study
  announcement document
• http//ils.unc.edu/bmh/isb/UNC_survey_announcemen
  t.htm
• or
• bmh_at_ils.unc.edu