Information Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item From Someone Who Has Been There: Information Seeking in Mentoring(2013) Follman, Rebecca Parks; St. Jean, Beth; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For tenure-track faculty, mentoring can be an important source of information needed for success in their new career and institution. Although information behavior is central to the mentoring relationship, mentoring has not yet been looked at through an information behavior lens. This study sought to begin to fill this gap by investigating mentees' perceptions regarding how mentees and mentors share information, what motivates mentees to seek information, what barriers exist to their information seeking, and what contributes to a successful mentoring relationship. Data were collected using a Web survey and follow-up interviews, both of which explored the mentoring experiences of tenure-track faculty at a major mid-Atlantic research university. Study findings suggest that the information seeking of mentees is akin to browsing in a document collection, that mentees' information needs are fluid and highly contextualized, and that there are affective barriers to information seeking within the context of the mentoring relationship.Item The Effect of Users' Work Tasks on Librarians' Database Selection(2007-08-06) Kim, Soojung; White, Marilyn Domas; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A recent trend in information searching research is task-based information searching, which views a user's task as a central factor for understanding information-seeking behaviors and designing information retrieval systems. To investigate empirically the role of tasks in information searching, particularly in the business domain, this study analyzes the database selection process used by librarians from the perspective of users' tasks. The first part of the study focused on identifying and characterizing business tasks and the associated questions needed to complete the tasks. An inventory of 30 business tasks and 144 associated business questions was developed through content analysis of Harvard Business School cases and other published materials. The second part of the study explored the influence of tasks on database selection by conducting a survey among business librarians in academic institutions. Nine sets of survey questionnaires were created based on the identified business tasks and questions and each questionnaire, containing a total of five business questions for two to three tasks, was disseminated through a Web-based survey tool. Out of 52 sampled librarians, 29 (56 percent response rate) participated in the study. The survey questionnaires focused on participants' use of tasks and related business questions to determine information types likely to answer the questions, to choose databases, and to determine the criteria used to select the databases. The characteristics of business tasks and questions were analyzed and linked to other elements - information types, database selection criteria, and selected databases - to understand the interplay among all elements in the database selection process. The analysis noted the participants' reliance on users' tasks in various aspects of an information searching process. A database selection process was further modeled to describe how five task or context-related criteria - company size, company type, industry sector, geographical setting, and business stage - influence database selection. The inventory of business tasks and questions, along with the patterns among the elements, set the stage for a task-based database selection system.