Understanding Information Seeking Behavior of Faculty and Students

This chapter reviews significant information seeking literature, focusing on general models that can provide a framework for those not familiar with the research in that area. It then explores models and characteristics that are unique to academic users, specifically undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members, highlighting similarities and differences among these groups of users. Changes to information seeking that have resulted from technological advances are also examined. The chapter concludes with a look at resource discovery tools in light of what is known about the information seeking behaviors of academic users, and recommendations are provided for those considering adoption of resource discovery tools.