A theory of the task‐based information retrieval process: a summary and generalisation of a longitudinal study

Abstract

A theory of the task-based information retrieval process: a summary and generalisation of a longitudinal study Pertti Vakkari Article information:To cite this document: Pertti Vakkari, (2001),"A theory of the task-based information retrieval process: a summary and generalisation of a longitudinal study"Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-srm:463575 [] For AuthorsIf you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.The aim of this article is threefold: (1) to give a summary of empirical results reported earlier on relations between students' problem stages in the course of writing their research proposals for a master's thesis and the information sought, choice of search terms and tactics and relevance assessments of the information found for that task; (2) to show how the findings of the study refine Kuhlthau's model of the information search process in the field of information retrieval (IR); and (3) to construe a tentative theory of a task-based IR process based on the supported hypotheses. The results of the empirical studies show that there is a close connection between the students' problem stages (mental model) in the task performance and the information sought, the search tactics used and the assessment of the relevance and utility of the information found. The corroborated hypotheses expand the ideas in Kuhlthau's model in the domain of IR. A theory of task-based information searching based on the empirical findings of the study is presented.

Cognitive economy and satisficing in information seeking: A longitudinal study of undergraduate information behavior

“…Studies from the 1980s defined novices as those who had not undertaken independent online searching, or had undertaken a beginners' course in information seeking, (Howard, 1982;Harter, 1984) and defined expertise in terms of the number of searches carried out over a certain period, for example a month, (Howard, 1982) or for a certain time prior to the study (Harter, 1984). Later studies have followed a student group from relative inexperience to the attainment of far greater expertise (Whitmire, 2002;Vakkari, 2001;Wilson et al 2002;Kuhlthau, 2004;Spink et al, 2002a and b), and thus the experts and novices are, in effect, the same group of participants at different stages of development. Librarians have also been used as an expert group from whom lessons may be learnt for the design of digital library systems (Fields et al, 2004).…”

“…Novices tend now to be defined as those who are unfamiliar with a certain digital library (Blandford et al, 2001) or who, as in our study, have done little independent information seeking in an academic context. Vakkari (2001), for example, even regards MA students who have gained a first degree in Information Studies as relative novices in information seeking. The study reported here provides further evidence that a first degree in an information discipline is not a passport to search expertise.…”

“…experts in information seeking and the subject domain of the search, Holscher and Strube (2000) found that domain knowledge helps participants to select query terms that are more likely to produce a result set of useful size and quality. Expert searchers also use more synonyms (Hsieh-Yee, 1993;Vakkari, 2001); however, there is no consensus about their use of complex search expressions involving truncations, Boolean operators and phrase searching. Holscher and Strube (2000) and Chu and Law (2007a) found greater use of Booleans, but Aula (2005) and Hsieh-Yee, (1993) found fewer Boolean queries being used by experts.…”

“…This kind of longitudinal study of detailed development was undertaken by Chu and Law, who studied PhD students over a year, and by Vakkari (2001), who studied taught postgraduate students over a four month period. Kuhlthau (2001Kuhlthau ( , 2004) also undertook a longitudinal study of high school students while creating her model of stages of information search.…”

“…A few studies have employed a use-in-context approach, during which students were interviewed about and observed seeking information to support a real assignment or piece of research (Whitmire, 2002;Vakkari, 2001;Chu & Law, 2005, 2007a, 2007bAttfield et al, 2003). As Martzoukou (2005) observes, this is relatively rare, since most user 6 centred studies of information seeking rely on tasks which are artificial to at least some extent.…”