Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Information seeking behaviour

A plethora of studies and articles have been conducted examining various factors that affect information seeking behavior. These studies range from an examination of information-seeking behavior phenomena, to profiling the information-seeking behavior of a specific group of individuals. The dilemma scholars face in defining information seeking behaviour is articulated well by Case (2002: 5), who states that information seeking behaviour is a phenomenon that often defies generalization, usually escapes observation, and is difficult to generalize because it is a behaviour that varies so much across people, situations, and objects of interest; and so much of it takes place in a person’s head.
Fairer–Wessels, in Kakai, Ikoja–Odongo and Kigongo–Bukenya (2004: n.p), believes that information seeking behavior refers to the way people search for and utilize information. This process involves the reasons for seeking information, the kind of information being sought, and the ways and sources with which the required information is being sought (Patitungkho and Deshpande, 2001: n.p).
According to Wilson (2000: 1) “Information Seeking Behaviour is the purposive seeking for information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal. In the course of seeking, the individual may interact with manual information systems (such as a newspaper or a library), or with computer-based systems (such as the World Wide Web).” Wilson perceives information seeking behavior as the ‘micro-level’ of behavior employed by the searcher in interacting with information systems of all kinds, consisting of all the interactions with the system, whether at the level of human-computer interaction (for example, the use of a mouse) or at the intellectual level (for example, adopting a Boolean search strategy or determining the criteria for deciding which of two books selected from adjacent places on a library shelf is most useful), which in turn also involves mental acts, such as judging the relevance of the data or information retrieved. Information seeking behavior is expressed in various forms, from reading printed material, to research and experimentation.