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Learning about the information seeking of interdisciplinary scholars and students - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Library Trends, Fall, 1996 by Marcia J. Bates

Introduction

Successive decades of research on information needs and information-seeking behavior have emphasized the study of different broad constituencies of specialists. In the 1950s and 1960s - in part because of the availability of U.S. Federal grant money - the emphasis was on the needs of scientists and engineers (see Meadows, 1974). Needs in the social sciences were attended to in the 1970s, especially with some major research studies that were performed in Great Britain (see review in Hogeweg-de-Haart, 1984). Finally, in part through the support of, and activity of, the Getty Trust in the arts, attention turned to the arts and humanities in the 1980s and 1990s (see Watson-Boone, 1994; Bates, 1994; Bates et al., 1993, 1995).

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At least two more broad constituencies remain woefully lacking in research on information seeking:

1. The performers - as distinct from the scholars in the arts - the artists, designers, musicians, actors, dancers. 2. Interdisciplinary researchers - people engaged in the study of fields that span two or more of the established academic disciplines.

It is the second of these two groups that is the focus of this article.

Prior Suggestive Research

Research on information use and information@seeking behavior of people in interdisciplinary fields is sparse to nonexistent. To those whose studies have been missed, my apologies, but a literature review in the conventional places and under conventional terms resulted in the same low hit rate encountered in the past. With increasing interest in interdisciplinary work in scholarship, in fields such as popular culture, film studies, ethnic studies, gay and lesbian studies, and women,s studies, it is high time research on information seeking was done in this area.

But research on the information-seeking behavior of scholars and students in interdisciplinary fields would do even more than fill in an obvious gap in our knowledge of this segment of academia. There is reason to suspect that the problems and information-seeking patterns of this group may be dramatically different from those of the scholars in the classical academic disciplines such as history, literature, etc. even where an interdisciplinary field may draw its inspiration and researchers from people trained in these very same established disciplines.

In 1962, L. J. B. Mote published a study which contained some provocative results. Mote divided the scientific users of the Shell Thornton Research Centre Library (United Kingdom) into three groups according to whether their fields of research were low, medium, or high scatter. Low scatter fields were defined as those in "which the underlying principles are well developed, the literature is well organized, and the width of the subject area is fairly well defined" (p. 170). In high scatter fields, the number of different subjects is great and the organization of the literature is almost nonexistent. The medium group fell between the other two in degree of scatter.

Mote (1962), drawing from a sample of 178, found that the average number of inquiries requiring thirty or more minutes to answer per person during a three@year period was, for the low to high scatter group, 1.4, 3.6, and 20 (yes, twenty!), respectively. No one in the low scatter group made more than six inquiries and no one in the high scatter group made fewer than ten inquiries (p. 172). In a smaller sampling, the same pattern was found with requests that required under thirty minutes to resolve.

The low and high scatter groups diverged from each other by a factor of over ten to one. This is a most striking and suggestive result. Even though the study was done in the sciences and engineering, we may well wonder if such divergences might also be found in "high scatter" fields such as area and ethnic studies where the researcher must cross several disciplines to locate all relevant background material for a research project. Could it thus be the case that a researcher in an interdisciplinary field could have ten times as many problems with the process of gathering information for research as people in conventional disciplinary fields?

More recently, Packer and Soergel (1979) also studied scientists (chemists, in this case) in fields with low and high scatter. They focused on techniques used for keeping up to date, or "current awareness" techniques. They found that taking advantage of selective dissemination of information (SDI) services helped the scientists' efficiency in high scatter fields and actually reduced efficiency for those in low scatter fields. To put it differently, diametrically opposing strategies were optimal for researchers in high versus low scatter fields. (SDI is a technique whereby bibliographic citations or copies of new materials received in the library are selectively sent to individual researchers. The selection is based on profiles prepared of each researcher,s interests.) So again we see the high/low scatter difference in the character of fields producing a marked effect - in this case, scientists needing to engage in different strategies depending on how focused or scattered the field.

Learning about the information seeking of interdisciplinary scholars and students - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Library Trends, Fall, 1996 by Marcia J. Bates

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