ABSTRACT
The just-concluded review of information needs analysis, its purposes, importance, recommended manner of conduct and attendant difficulties, hopefully, leaves little room for doubt: only if people’s information needs and their ways and means of coping with these needs are routinely monitored and evaluated, can today’s vital requirement for effective information management and retrieval be appropriately met. This has direct implications for all of us in the present-day information environment, which sees us all fending for ourselves when it comes to sorting out our information needs. Indeed, this state of affairs has rendered the mastering of a basic comprehension of what information needs analysis is all about quite crucial for obtaining the positive outcomes we (and society) want. However, the need for taking a holistic approach to information needs concerns first and foremost information service providers. Expected to come up with up-to-date, swiftly delivered, custom-made, targeted, authoritative and qualitative solutions for meeting the constantly changing needs of information seekers, they have little choice but to collect and analyse information needs data as comprehensively as possible, and on an ongoing basis, too. Thus, keeping a watchful eye on individual information needs and practices should be an inescapable imperative for information professionals, a key management activity, the basis for all decision-making processes; hence the importance of their taking note of the needs analysis framework proposed here. Indeed, information professionals all agree, and have done so for decades,
that it is very, very important to understand their users, but have made almost no progress towards attaining their proclaimed goal. Rather the contrary, in fact: with the number of the ubiquitous (and anonymous) digital consumers amounting to many hundreds of millions in result of the information free-forall, undoubtedly information professionals know far less about their user base than they ever did. The result of this wholesale neglect is leading to fatal consequences: information professions are increasingly being decoupled from their consumers, a process which threatens to culminate in professional Armageddon. The now disintermediated seekers of information have massive and unfettered choice and are quite happy to take matters into their own hands, simply doing it themselves, often badly, of course.
