This paper was commissioned by Professor Gernot Wersig of the Freie Universität, Berlin in 1980, as part of his Project, Methodeninstrumentarium zur Benutzforschung in Information und Dokumentation. It attempted to set out what was, for the time, a novel perspective on appropriate methodologies for the study of human information seeking behaviour, focusing on qualitative methods and action rese...

We describe an “expert coach” for students’ collaborative information seeking and knowledge construction. This coach compares an expert’s prespecification of the evidential relations among “snippets” of HTML-based text with the current state of a diagram constructed by students in the course of collaborative scientific inquiry. The expert advises the students by pointing out information that ma...

Rent-seeking in the trade sector is an outcome of restrictions imposed on tariffs and import quotas by a government. In an effort to acquire more privilege in foreign trade, labor allocates a part of its time-effort to rent-seeking activity, while cutting down on production work. Given the importance of rent-seeking activity due to restrictions imposed by the government in the Iranian economy, ...

The Internet has become an important and preferred source of health information. Although the literature has highlighted several key predictors that influence an individual's online health information seeking behavior, insufficient attention has been paid to the changes in the predictors' roles and effects over time. This study explores and compares the effects that specific predictors had on o...

In understanding a person’s information seeking behavior and choice of information sources, it becomes very important to understand the context surrounding the search. This context gives rise to the information need and leads a person to look for information. Research in information seeking behavior, while concentrating on systemand-person centric research, has, so far, left out studying how in...

In this paper we argue for a combined approach of logging analysis and interview techniques to evaluate the usability of web distributed applications. Logging analysis has proven as an efficient and effective method to investigate websites usability. However it seems insufficient for more complex applications. We outline a case study of a library search system, in which users’ information seeki...