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

science library seems better suited to support their highly interdisciplinary

research. (p. 295)

Over the years there has been a strong pattern at major universities of developing discipline-sized libraries in parallel to discipline-oriented departments. Hurd's results suggest that the assumption behind that practice - that libraries, in their size and organization, would do best to mirror the intellectual "turf" organization of disciplines - is misguided.

Prospective Possibilities in Basic Research

All the studies discussed in the previous section are notable for their striking results. In each case, the implications are major, not minor, ones involving small adjustments. These results suggest that there may be dramatic differences in the kinds of strategies needed and the amount of effort needed to seek information, depending on the degree of coherence of the bibliographic resources of a field. In sum, studying researcher information seeking in interdisciplinary fields may tell us not only about the needs and problems of people in those fields - something we very much need to learn about - but also about what factors, in general, contribute to ease and difficulty in information seeking in scholarship.

In fact, the results of the Mote study touch on one of the most fundamental - and therefore rarely examined - assumptions in our field. It is taken as a given in library and information science that the organization, description, and indexing of information in indexes, catalogs, and reference books contributes to the successful and speedy retrieval of information by users. Do we know that it does this in fact@, Both the Mote (1962) and Packer and Soergel (1979) studies indirectly suggest that such information organization does make a tremendous difference.

On the other hand, Stoan (1984) has argued persuasively that the model librarians have developed of information searching in academic libraries bears little resemblance to actual research techniques used by scholars and their graduate students. Our conception of the kinds of information access and library organization that will be useful to scholarly users might, in fact, match poorly with their real needs. Thus the question remains open as to whether libraries, access apparatus is, in fact, optimally supportive of scholars, library research.

We might learn much more about just what kinds of organization produce what sort of an effect were we to compare fields that are well controlled - such as conventional academic disciplines - against fields that are not well controlled - such as interdisciplinary concentrations.

The Mote (1962), Packer and Soergel (1979), and Hurd (1992) studies were all done in the sciences and engineering, and we know that there are major differences between the sciences and the humanities and humanistically-oriented social sciences that are the emphasis in this article (see Bates, 1994; Bates et al., 1993). Nonetheless, these studies are highly suggestive.

It certainly seems to be a reasonable preliminary hypothesis that scholars in interdisciplinary fields may have to engage in both substantially more information seeking - and of a different kind - than scholars in a conventional discipline.