MIT 144F
Week3: The Information Search Process as a Component of Research.

Late breaking article:

This month's Journal of the American Society for Information Sciencehas a brilliant article by Michael K. Buckland that discusses the issues brought up in last week's class (i.e. the nature of documents). I will try to put a copy of the paper on reserve at Weldon ASAP. The citation is:

Taylor's Filters

In 1968, Robert Taylor published a paper that is now a classic in the Library Science world entitled Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries. From this article, librarians have been trained to be aware of what are now called "Taylor's Filters" . While intended for an audience of reference librarians, this paper is useful for understanding two things:

  1. how many librarians model the translation of information needs into queries that occurs within their clients; and,
  2. how many librarians model how the users will filter the information they recieve via an interaction with an information retrieval system (this includes libraries, databases, colleagues, etc.).

If one has an understanding of the processes that Taylor attempts to model, it becomes clearer where possible sources of error and communication failures might occur during the information seeking process. Can you see how Shannon's channel model might be used in conjunction with Taylor's Filters?

Key Concepts from the Leckie (1996) Article

I have made some notes concerning the differences between the search strategies of expert and novice researchers.

Key Concepts from the Fink (1989) Article

My reading of the Fink article has it divided into two sections: General concepts (more ways to think about information and the societal factors which influence its creation, dissemination and use; and, Critical thinking concepts (various ways that one could approach the evaluation of information).