Competency J: Information-Seeking Behavior
Describe the fundamental concepts of information-seeking behaviors and how they should be considered when connecting individuals or groups with accurate, relevant and appropriate information.
Introduction
I understand this competency as the recognition that people do not look for information the way a library is organized. They look for it from inside a situation, and the situation shapes what they ask, where they go first, whom they trust, and when they stop. A teenager who has just brought home a bearded dragon and a member of a herpetological society may both ask a librarian for books about lizards. They need very different things. A librarian who answers the question as asked will serve neither of them well. A librarian who understands information-seeking behavior asks first what the person is trying to do.
Taylor (1968) gave the field its most durable account of why the question as asked is rarely the real question. He described an information need as developing through four levels: a visceral need the person may not be able to put into words, a conscious description of it, a formalized statement, and finally a compromised question, which is the need reshaped into what the person thinks the library or system can answer. The reference interview exists to work backward from the compromised question toward the real need. Wilson (1999) placed this work within a larger structure. In his account, information behavior is the broadest category and includes everything a person does in relation to information, information seeking is the purposeful part of that behavior, and information searching is the narrower activity of working with a particular system. A reference encounter that jumps straight to searching skips the levels where the need is actually defined.
The way a librarian conducts the interview affects what the person finds and whether they come back. Ross et al. (2019) document how often reference encounters end without the need being understood, and they describe negative closure: behaviors such as unmonitored referrals, signals that the question is unwelcome, or an answer given before the question is clear, which end the encounter on the librarian’s terms rather than the user’s. Radford’s Content/Relational Model, developed in the same research program, holds that success depends on both the content of the answer and the relationship formed in the encounter, including approachability, interest, and respect. The Reference and User Services Association (2023) turns these findings into behavioral guidelines for reference providers, from being visible and approachable through listening, searching, and following up.
Some information seeking happens in leisure, not at work or school, and it has its own patterns. Stebbins (2009) called on library and information science to study serious leisure, the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that people find substantial enough to build something like a career in it. Serious hobbyists are often skilled seekers within their pursuit, with their own experts, organizations, and media. What they may lack is a library that recognizes the pursuit as legitimate and collects for it.
This competency matters to me because my training is in human factors, which begins with the user. I learned to observe how people actually perform a task and to treat a gap between the designed process and the real one as information about the design. I bring that habit to reference work: when a person cannot find what they need, I first ask what they were trying to do and where they looked, and only then what the system should have offered. The competency matters to the profession because libraries compete for attention with search engines, chatbots, and community sources that are fast and tailored to their users, and that are not always accurate. A library that wants to connect people with accurate, relevant, and appropriate information has to understand where those people already go and why. The evidence below shows me analyzing reference encounters from the user’s side, studying how one community seeks information and where the library fails it, and matching information resources to the search behavior of a specific user population.
Evidence
My preparation for this competency came primarily from INFO 210, Reference and Information Services, taught by Mike Garabedian, where I studied reference interview models, Radford’s Content/Relational Model, search strategy, and the evaluation of reference sources, and wrote weekly discussion posts applying them. I also drew on INFO 200, Information Communities, where I studied information behavior theory and followed one information community through the semester.
Evidence 1: Reference interactions essay (INFO 210, Assignment 1)
For this assignment I took a real information need of my own through two reference interactions, one virtual and one in person, and analyzed both against course concepts. My need was material for a take-home resource kit to train new volunteers at an equine-assisted services program. The virtual interaction was with a public library’s chatbot, and the in-person interaction was at the reference desk of a second public library system. [Add the date and the essay’s title.]
The essay demonstrates both parts of this competency, because it describes the concepts and then shows what happens when they are or are not applied. The chatbot could not interpret a basic subject query and kept returning me to menus of frequently asked questions that had nothing to do with my need. It treated my question as a request to be matched to a script. In Taylor’s (1968) terms it could only accept a compromised question, and mine did not fit any of its compromises. The in-person librarian was courteous but rushed, and did not ask the follow-up questions that would have revealed that I needed material suitable for volunteers with no horse experience, not general books about horses. The encounter ended before my need was clear, which is the pattern Ross et al. (2019) describe as negative closure. Both failures were failures of the interview, not of the collection. I used the Reference and User Services Association’s behavioral guidelines and Radford’s model to identify what each interaction would have needed: for the chatbot, a way to ask a clarifying question or to hand off to a person, and for the librarian, open questions about purpose and audience and a follow-up before I left. [Add one thing you would do differently as the librarian in that encounter.] Being the user rather than the librarian was the point of the exercise, and it made the cost of a skipped question concrete in a way that reading about it had not.
Evidence 2: Information community study (INFO 200, LIS Theory Summary and Information Sources Survey)
I wrote this research paper in December 2024 for INFO 200. It studies people who take part in shooting sports and hunting as an information community, using Stebbins’s serious leisure perspective as its framework. The research combined a review of the scholarly literature and large survey studies of hunters and target shooters, catalog searches in two public library systems in the Phoenix area and in SJSU’s King Library, and a day of contextual inquiry, in which I took an introductory firearms safety course for women at a public shooting facility to observe how newcomers to the community are taught and what information they are given. The paper drew on a blog I kept throughout the semester, in which I followed the community’s sources, organizations, and online discussions as they appeared. [[Add the link.]]
The paper demonstrates both parts of this competency. First, it describes the community’s information-seeking behavior in terms of the theory. Members invest years in building skill, often begin as children, and most commonly learn from a parent or grandparent. They seek practical, procedural, and safety information, and they place their trust in mentors and specialist organizations within the community. The research also showed that the community is far more varied than its stereotype. Survey research divides participants into distinct groups with different motivations, and newer participants include more women and members of minority groups. New gun owners were the most flexible in their interests and in where they looked for information, which makes them the group a library could most easily reach.
Second, the paper considers that behavior when connecting the community with information. The catalog searches found that library materials on guns concentrated on gun violence and political debate, with very little on the safe handling, sporting use, and practical knowledge that this community actually seeks. A member who came to either public library would find little that matched their purpose and would reasonably conclude that the library was not for them, while the sources they already rely on are often produced by advocacy organizations. The literature on cultural competence explained why this matters: values-based, respectful communication makes gun owners more receptive to safety information, and communication that stigmatizes them can make misinformation more attractive than reliable sources. The paper therefore recommends that libraries collect neutral, practical material on safety and sporting use and treat the pursuit as legitimate, so that the library becomes a trusted source for a community that currently has little reason to use it. Taking the course myself was part of that commitment. I did not own a gun or take part in shooting sports, and I stated in the paper that an outsider can miss details that a member would see.
Evidence 3: Database evaluation report, SPORTDiscus with Full Text and Gale Health and Wellness (INFO 210, group project)
In a group of six, I helped evaluate two databases for a hypothetical health sciences university library serving about 3,200 students, most of them in physical therapy, athletic training, and allied health programs. We compared SPORTDiscus with Full Text and Gale Health and Wellness against eight criteria, including scope, accuracy, ease of use, arrangement, and appropriateness, and ran the same test searches in both. I wrote the conclusion and recommendation and compiled and formatted the full report in APA style. [Confirm your role and add any section you also wrote.]
The report demonstrates connecting a group with appropriate information by matching a resource to how that group searches. Both databases were accurate and current, so the decision turned on fit with the users. Upper-division and graduate students in clinical programs search for evidence to support practice, and they need precise Boolean searching, controlled subject vocabulary, and peer-reviewed content. SPORTDiscus serves that behavior directly, with advanced search on its main interface, a subject thesaurus, and a PICOT framework for structuring clinical questions. For concussion management it returned 208 full-text, peer-reviewed results to Gale Health and Wellness’s 104. Gale Health and Wellness is designed for browsing and for general readers, with a simple home page, visual topic navigation, text-to-speech, and translation into more than 60 languages. Those are real strengths, but they serve consumer health seekers and beginners, not the population this library serves. The conclusion I wrote recommended SPORTDiscus and kept Gale Health and Wellness in view for a future cycle, when the library’s patient health literacy needs might justify it. The recommendation was, in effect, an argument from information-seeking behavior: the better database is the one whose design matches how its users actually look for information.
Conclusion
I will apply this competency by asking what situation a person is in before deciding what source to offer, by asking at least one open question about purpose before searching, and by treating every community I serve as having its own information practices that I need to learn. I expect to use it in instructional design and training, where learners arrive with their own vocabularies and trusted sources; in my volunteer work with the Immersive Learning Research Network, where I write guidance for newcomers; and in the design of chatbots and virtual guides, where my own experience as a user showed what happens when a system cannot ask a clarifying question. To stay current I will follow Reference & User Services Quarterly, Information Research, and the Information Behavior special interest group of the Association for Information Science and Technology. [Add any source you read regularly.]
References
Reference and User Services Association. (2023). Guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers. American Library Association. [Add the URL from ala.org.]
Ross, C. S., Nilsen, K., & Radford, M. L. (2019). Conducting the reference interview: A how-to-do-it manual for librarians (3rd ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman.
Stebbins, R. A. (2009). Leisure and its relationship to library and information science: Bridging the gap. Library Trends, 57(4), [618–631; confirm the page range].
Taylor, R. S. (1968). Question-negotiation and information seeking in libraries. College & Research Libraries, 29(3), 178–194.
Wilson, T. D. (1999). Models in information behaviour research. Journal of Documentation, 55(3), 249–270. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007145