Competency J
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.
Understanding the Competency
Competency J emphasizes the study of how people look for information, and the application of that knowledge to the services and systems that connect them with what they need. Information-seeking behavior is the term researchers use for everything a person does after recognizing that gap in their own knowledge and setting out to close it. This includes the moment a need is first felt, the decision about where to turn for help, the strategies used once searching begins, and the judgments made about whether the information found was worth having.
The intuitive model of this process assumes that a person knows what they want, asks for it clearly, and receives it. Research in library and information science has consistently demonstrated otherwise. People are frequently unable to articulate what they need, do not know what a collection contains, and find that their understanding of their own question changes as they search. Case and Given (2016) observe that information seeking is shaped as much by a person's context, prior knowledge, and emotional state, as by the topic of the inquiry. Wilson (1999) distinguishes three nested categories that clarify the scope of the subject. The first is information behavior, which includes encountering information accidentally and avoiding it deliberately. The second is information seeking behavior, which is purposeful activity undertaken in response to a recognized need. Finally, information searching behavior is the narrow interaction a person has with the system.
The competency further specifies three qualities of the information a professional is responsible for delivering. Accuracy concerns whether information is verifiable, authoritative, and current. Relevance concerns whether it addresses the person's actual need rather than the literal words of their question. Lastly, appropriateness concerns whether it fits the person receiving it, including reading level, language, format, and accessibility. A source that is accurate and topically relevant, but delivered in a form the person cannot use, has not connected anyone with anything. The reference to individuals or groups describes two scales of practice. There is the single encounter, in which a professional helps one person move from a vague question toward a usable answer. Then there's the design work that occurs long before anyone arrives, through community analysis, arrangement and description, and information architecture.
Prominent Theories of Information-Seeking Behavior
Robert Taylor’s (1968) account of question negotiation explains why stated questions are unreliable. Taylor argued that a question passes through four levels before it reaches a professional. The visceral need is an unexpressed and often unconscious dissatisfaction. The conscious need is a vague mental description of an unresolved problem. The formalized need is a rational statement that the person could say allowed. The compromised need is a question as it is finally posed reshaped by the seekers assumptions about what the system can handle. The consequences that the question asked at a service point is not the need itself, but a translation of it made under assumptions that may be entirely inaccurate.
Marcia Bates (1989) challenged a different assumption. The classic retrieval model treats searching as a single query answered by one best match set of results. Bates argued that a searcher instead begins with one question, learns something, revises the question, and searches again, gathering useful pieces along the way in a process she compared to picking berries from bush to bush. As Bates states, "specifically, in a real search there are many different ways people encounter information of interest to them.” She identified six such ways, including footnote chasing, citation searching, journal runs, area scanning, subject searches and bibliographies, and author searching. Bates (2007) later described the result as "an evolving query, which shifts during the search." A system built only for exact match retrieval therefore fails searchers whose questions are still forming.
Carol Kuhlthau (1991) established that searching is an emotional process as well as an intellectual one. Her Information Search Process model traces six stages, moving from initiation and selection through exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation, and documents the feelings that accompany each. Her counterintuitive finding, which she termed the “uncertainty principle”, is that anxiety and confusion rise during the exploration stage before falling once a focus takes shape. A researcher who appears most confused partway through a project may not be failing, but may be precisely where the process predicts, which makes the moment the most useful point for intervention.
Brenda Dervin's Sense-Making approach supplies a method for acting on these insights, conceptualizing and information need as a gap between where a person is and where they want to be Durban and Dewdney (1986) translated this into a technique they call neutral questions, in which the professional asks about the situation that produced the Gap and the use the person intends to make of an answer, rather than the topic. Such questions surface the underlying need instead of confirming the compromise the person has already made.
Two further studies extend these models to the settings and populations where they matter most. Duff and Johnson (2002) found that historians research non-linearly, depend heavily on browsing and contextual clues, and regularly locate valuable documents they were not seeking. This is a phenomenon they captured in the phrase “accidentally found on purpose.” They conclude that serendipity is a central mechanism of archival research rather than a flaw, and that finding aids–the descriptive guides archivists produced to explain what a collection contains–are useful but insufficient on their own. Chatman (1996) addressed the people such models overlook. Chatman found that individuals in marginalized circumstances often do not seek information at all, and may judge information from outside their immediate world to be irrelevant to their lives. Silence from a population is not evidence that it has no needs.
Why it Matters to the Profession
These theories are what distinguish an information profession from a storage operation. Any organization can hold materials, however what a professional contributes is the ability to get behind a stated question to an actual need. The reference interview is where this becomes visible. The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), publishes Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers (2013). In which, there are five observable behaviors that distinguish effective service: approachability, interest, listening and inquiring, searching, and follow-up. The inclusion of follow-up is theoretically grounded rather than merely courteous, because if queries evolve as Bates (1989) argued, a transaction that concludes at the first possible answer has ended prematurely.
The competency also carries an equity dimension. Barriers to information are frequently produced by institutions rather than by users. A collection described in specialist vocabulary or a system that rewards only exact match searching will generate little visibility and information seeking-behavior, an absence that is easily misread as lack of demand.
For me, this competency connects the strands of my own professional background. In digital asset management and creative asset work, my effectiveness depended on anticipating how colleagues would search for materials, and on recognizing that the terms a designer used to describe an image are rarely the terms under which it had been filed. In archival work the same problem appears at a larger scale and with higher stakes, because a researcher who cannot locate a record often has no way of knowing that it exists.
Considering Information-Seeking Behaviors When Designing and Providing Services
Applying this knowledge at the individual scale means treating the opening question as a starting point rather than a specification. Neutral questioning, open-ended prompts, and deliberate follow-up allow a professional to reach the formalized need behind the compromised one. However, it also means reading the emotional register of an interaction since Kuhlthau’s (1991) work indicates that a researcher's uncertainty partway through a project is an expected stage rather than a sign that the search has gone wrong.
At the group scale, the same knowledge is applied through the structures that stand in for a professional when no one is present. Arrangement and description determine what relationships a user can perceive within a collection, metadata and controlled vocabulary determine whether a person's own words will retrieve anything, and interface navigation determines whether browsing is possible or whether the system demands that users already know what they see. Duff and Johnson's (2002) finding gives this work direction. If serendipitous discovery is central to research, system should support browsing and lateral movement–a constraint that matters increasingly as digitization removes the physical proximity that once produced accidental discovery.
Evidence 1
The first piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency J is my research summary titled “LIS Model/Theory Research Summary: The Berrypicking Model by Marcia J. Bates," completed in INFO 200: Information Communities (Spring 2023). This assignment required an in-depth examination of a foundational model within library and information science, an assessment of its influence on subsequent scholarship, and an application of the model to a specific information community.
Description of the Artifact
The paper examined Marcia Bates is Berrypicking model, developed in 1989 as an alternative to the classic information retrieval model. It explains the central mechanism of the model, which is that a searcher’s query evolves continuously as they learn, so that searching resembles picking berries from one bush and then another rather than executing a single query against a database. The paper then addresses the six modes of searching Bates identified as expansions to the retrieval systems, including footnote chasing, citation searching, journal runs, area scanning, subject searches in bibliographies and indexing services, and author searching. Then the paper goes on to situate the model within Bates is broader argument that the classic retrieval model, if left to dominate information science thinking, would constrain the development of systems that genuinely meet user needs.
The second portion of the paper traces the model's influence through five subsequent studies that cite Bate’s work, including research on search-as-learning frameworks, task completion processes and learning contexts, embodiment and information behavior research, and trail patterns across heterogeneous information environments. The final portion applies the model to the Solarpunk information community, considering how members of a decentralized community gather and share information collectively as they pursue a shared vision.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
This artifact directly demonstrates the first component of Competency J, which requires the articulation of prominent theories of information-seeking behavior. Berrypicking is among the most widely cited models in the field. The paper does more than summarize the model. It also explains the idea that Bates was arguing against, which is the classic retrieval model's assumption that a user arrives with one fixed question and receives a single best matched set of results. Identifying what a theory argues against is what distinguishes understanding a model from restating it.
The section tracing five citing works demonstrates a further capability that is central to professional practice. Understanding individual theory is necessary, but situating it within an ongoing scholarly conversation is what allows a professional to judge whether a model still holds and where it has been extended or challenged. By identifying how researchers have built upon Bates across three decades and multiple sub-fields, I demonstrated that I can evaluate a theories continuing relevance rather than accept it as settled.
This artifact also connects to the design component of the competency, because Bates’s six models of searching are themselves design recommendations. Each describes a pathway that a retrieval system must actively support if it is to accommodate an evolving query. My engagement with these modes prepared me to recognize a specific and common failure. Which is that a catalog, finding aid, or asset management system built solely for exact match retrieval will serve users who already know what they want, while quietly failing those who are still forming their question. Recognizing that a system search design encodes an assumption about user behavior, and that the assumption is frequently wrong, is the practical value that this artifact provided.
Evidence 2
The second piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency J is my structured abstract of Duff and Johnson's "Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives, " completed in INFO 287: Evidence Based Decision Making (Spring 2026). This assignment required a systematic appraisal of a published research study, decomposing it into its constituent parts in order to evaluate the strength of its evidence, and its applicability to professional practice.
Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16NBq0oSFXHSP8L3k2-K0-ucxOoYTygsSTAIEUDNslwk/edit?usp=sharing
Description of the Artifact
The structured abstract analyzes Duff and Johnson's 2002 study of how historians locate materials in archival repositories. The abstract identifies the gap the study addresses, which is that retrieval models developed for libraries assume structured searching and indexing. However, archival collections are frequently unprocessed or minimally described, therefore they cannot be searched in the same way. I document the study's exploratory purpose, its setting across multiple repositories rather than a single institution, and its participants–who were historians with sustained experience conducting primary source research.
The abstract then evaluates the study's methodology. The design is qualitative and interpretive, and the absence of any formal intervention should be noted as the study examines existing practice rather than testing a treatment. Additionally, the data collection is semi-structured interviews analyzed thematically for recurring patterns. This paper summarizes the central findings, which are that archival research is non-linear, that historians regularly encounter valuable materials they were not seeking, that finding aids are useful but insufficient for conveying the depth and context of a collection, and that archivist themselves function as an essential part of the discovery process. This artifact concludes with a discussion question I developed, asking how arrangement by provenance compares with subject-based classification in supporting serendipitous discovery, and whether one approach better serves user needs than the other.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
This artifact demonstrates both components of Competency J, and the course context is essential to why. Evidence-based decision making is not a practice of summarizing research for its own sake. It is the discipline of appraising evidence in order to act on it, which means this artifact represents the movement from understanding information-seeking behavior to using it. My analysis of the study’s design, sample, and method demonstrates that I can assess how much confidence a body of evidence warrants before allowing it to shape a professional decision.
The discussion question I developed is where that appraisal becomes an applied problem. By asking whether provenance-based arrangement or subject classification better support serendipitous discovery, I am posing a question about a concrete design decision. Provenance–the archival principle that records should be kept in the groupings and order established by their creator–preserves the context in which materials were produced and allows a researcher to perceive relationships that no subject heading would reveal. Subject classification improves the retrieval of known topics but severs those relationships. Formulating this question required me to recognize that an arrangement decision is not a neutral administrative choice, but a determination of what future users will and will not be able to find.
Finally this artifact demonstrates my understanding that information-seeking behavior differs by user population and setting. Duff and Johnson's historians did not search in the manner that retrieval systems were designed to expect, and the study makes clear that services built on an inaccurate model of user behavior will underserve the population they were intended to help. Appraising this evidence prepared me to design and evaluate access systems against how a defined group of users actually behaves, rather than against an assumed ideal.
Evidence 3
The third piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency J is my annotated bibliography on remote and virtual users, completed in INFO 284-17: Reference and Information Services in Archives (Spring 2024). This assignment required identifying and critically evaluating scholarly literature addressing a specific user population assessing both the contributions and the methodological limitations of each source.
Description of the Artifact
The bibliography examines three sources concerning users who access archival collections remotely. The first is a usability study of Archive-It, a web archiving subscription service operated by the Internet Archive and one of the most widely adopted tools of its kind. The study identified six areas requiring improvement, including a more comprehensive search box, metadata for video content, tooltips and a glossary for unfamiliar terminology, normalized and indexed date fields, an unpublished metadata option, and customizable metadata labels. In my annotation I noted that the study did not control for participants’ prior technological knowledge and drew predominantly from academic users, limitations that constrain how far its findings can be generalized.
The second source surveys and interviews researchers about their use of computational methods with digital collections, finding that participants widely considered digital archives difficult to access and not user-friendly, which push them back toward traditional research methods. The third examines design-thinking as an approach to opening dark archives, meaning collections that are held by an institution but remain closed to users. I evaluated the limitations of that argument, including the resource constraints facing smaller institutions that cannot fund user studies or cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the risk that a prototype the author herself characterizes as “quick and dirty” may deter the very users it was built to attract.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
This artifact most directly demonstrates the second component of Competency J, which requires the use of information-seeking behaviors in designing and providing services that assist people in accessing information. The six Archive-It findings are information-seeking behaviors translated into design requirements. The recommendation for tooltips and a glossary exists, because users could not map their own vocabulary onto the system's terminologies. This is Taylor's compromised need appearing in a digital interface decades after he described it. Engaging with these findings required me to read observed user behavior as a design brief rather than as a list of complaints.
The artifact also demonstrates my ability to reason about people who are not visibly present. Dark archives generate no seeking behavior at all, and the significant insight is that this silence is not evidence of absent need. It is the same person principle Chatman (1996) reached in studying information poverty, arrived at from an entirely different direction. Recognizing that a service must account for the users it has failed to reach, and not only for the users it can observe, is central to connecting groups with information they can actually obtain.
Critically, evaluating rather than summarizing these sources, is what makes this artifact evidence of competence rather than a familiarity. Identifying that a usability study draws almost entirely from academic participants, and that design thinking presumes institutional resources many archives do not possess, demonstrates that I can assess whether a proposed service model will hold for a given population and institution. A professional who cannot make that assessment risks adopting recommendations developed for users who do not resemble their own.
Conclusion
The work represented in these artifacts demonstrates how theories of information-seeking behavior inform the design and delivery of services that connect people with information they can use. My analysis of Bates's Berrypicking Model established the theoretical foundation, showing that searching is an evolving process rather than a single transaction. My structured abstract of Duff and Johnson's study demonstrates my ability to appraise empirical evidence about a specific user population, and translate it into an implied question about archival arrangement. My annotated bibliography on remote and virtual users connected that understanding to concrete design requirements, and to the users institution may be failing without knowing it. Together, these artifacts illustrate that understanding how people search is inseparable from the responsibility to build systems that accommodate them.
In my future career I expect to apply this competency in archival, media, and cultural heritage settings where researchers, producers, and creative staff must locate materials within large and often incompletely described collections. Understanding that the stated request is rarely the underlying need, and that discovery frequently depends on browsing and context rather than precise retrieval, will shape how I conduct reference interactions and how I structure finding aids, metadata, and asset management systems.
To remain current I will follow the Association for Information Science and Technology’s Special Interest Group on Information Needs, Seeking and Use (SIG-USE), which is the principal professional forum for research in this area. Additionally, I will keep a close eye on the Society of American Archivists Reference, Access and Outreach section, which addresses user services and access practice in archival settings specifically. Lastly, I will look at the Reference and User Services Quarterly, the peer-reviewed journal of the Reference and User Services Association, which publishes ongoing research on reference practice and user behavior. Continued engagement with these sources will allow me to keep my understanding of user behavior aligned with current research as information environments continue to change.
Note on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (Anthropic, 2026) was used in preparing this essay to help identify relevant scholarly literature, to suggest the essay’s organizational structure, and to check grammar and APA formatting. All writing, evidence selection, and analysis are my own.
References
Abrams, S., Antracoli, A., Appel, R., Caust-Ellenbogen, C., Denison, S., Duncan, S., & Ramsay, S. (2019). Sowing the seeds for more usable web archives: A usability study of Archive-It. The American Archivist, 82(2), 440–469. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-19
Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Opus 5) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai
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Bates, M. J. (2007). What is browsing—really? A model drawing from behavioral science research. Information Research, 12(4).
Case, D. O., & Given, L. M. (2016). Looking for information: A survey of research on information seeking, needs, and behavior (4th ed.). Emerald Group Publishing.
Chatman, E. A. (1996). The impoverished life-world of outsiders. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(3), 193–206.
Dervin, B., & Dewdney, P. (1986). Neutral questioning: A new approach to the reference interview. RQ, 25(4), 506–513.
Duff, W. M., & Johnson, C. A. (2002). Accidentally found on purpose: Information-seeking behavior of historians in archives. The Library Quarterly, 72(4), 472–496. https://doi.org/10.1086/lq.72.4.40039793
Jaillant, L. (2022). Design thinking, UX and born-digital archives: Solving the problem of dark archives closed to users. In Archives, access and artificial intelligence (Vol. 2, pp. 83–108). Bielefeld University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839455845-004
Jaillant, L., & Aske, K. (2024). Are users of digital archives ready for the AI era? Obstacles to the application of computational research methods and new opportunities. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 16(4), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3631125
Kuhlthau, C. C. (1991). Inside the search process: Information seeking from the user’s perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361–371.
Reference and User Services Association. (2013). Guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/rusa/resources/guidelines/guidelinesbehaviora l
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
