Information behavior

One of my first information school classes was called “information behavior.” I always thought this was a silly name, because, well, how does information behave exactly? Information misbehavior—now that would be an interesting thing to study.

It turned out to be not so much about how information behaves, but rather how people interact with information. The idea of using such a general term, I think, was supposed to suggest all the multifarious ways in which people and information interact: people produce, seek, encounter, disseminate, use, and avoid it, to name a few examples. The course mainly focused, though, on one component of information behavior: information seeking.

In a way this makes sense. Librarians tend to consider helping people find what they’re looking for a pretty important part of their job, and we tend to think of our clients as people who need information that we can help them get access to. But I’ve often wondered if there are other ways in which librarians can help people interact with information.

I got to thinking about this again the other day, when I got a chance to listen to my astute classmate Jen Waller present about research she’s doing on the information needs of small farmers. Here’s the interesting thing: on the whole, the farmers she’s interviewed feel pretty good about finding the information they need on their own. The information need they want help with is distributing information about their farms to consumers. Jen talked about some ideas she had for addressing this problem by improving a website that connects farmers and consumers.

In some ways this isn’t very radical—you can’t help people seek information if you don’t have a system of distribution. But the information distribution librarians do is generally organized from the perspective of helping the seeker: how would it change our methods if we thought more about helping the distributer as well?

Reading for all the wrong reasons

I’ve been trying to read more fiction lately, and to stretch myself to read a little more widely, outside of the “good” books I usually feel drawn toward. (I just finished a not-nearly-as-bad-as-I-expected-it-to-be Nora Roberts.)

As I spend more time reading this unfamiliar stuff, I find myself rethinking why it is that I like to read, what value it gives me. And since I want to be a librarian, what good am I doing the world by recommending books to people?

It’s a complicated and interesting problem, and I believe there’s a lot more to it than “reading is good for you” or even “reading good books is good for you.” I’m working on a longer post considering this question, but this afternoon I stumbled across a paragraph that makes a few steps toward answering it.

This is from Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which I discovered the other day on my library’s new books shelf (oddly, since it was written in 2005). She is considering the “compulsive habit of reading” that she and most other novelists were guilty of as children:

Undoubtedly, we were reading for all the wrong reasons—escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and because we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. We did not have very good manners, because in numerous ways to be cited later, reading books is deleterious to good manners. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid.

This seems like a pretty good starting point for some of the reasons why we (not just novelists) read. I’m still working on articulating why it matters. More to come, I hope, on this question. I know I’ll be thinking about it.