ABSTRACT
Where information needs and practices are concerned, the rather worn-out cliché ‘not everyone is the same’ assumes new proportions, for the huge population of today’s digital consumers demonstrates truly massive diversity. Indeed, CIBER’s research programmes have all found substantial differences between consumers and their information-seeking activities in cyberspace (Nicholas et al., 2006a; Nicholas et al., 2007a; Nicholas et al., 2008b; Nicholas et al., 2008c; Nicholas et al., 2008e). Students do not behave like staff, women do not behave like men, chemists do not behave like historians and Germans do not behave like Italians, even when using exactly the same resource. Unfortunately, the availability of large amounts of usage data generated by the logs of digital libraries and resource discovery tools has made it all too easy for LIS researchers to come up with seemingly universal trends and patterns of information behaviour. After all, we are talking here of many hundreds of millions of people, for we are all ardent seekers and users of information. Inevitably, then, the population we are looking at is bound to be anything but a homogenous body. Generalising on the back of data coming from such a varied population can prove to be very misleading, not to say meaningless, even outright dangerous. Can you really clump together in an analysis, say, Nobel Prize winners with first year undergraduate students and get anything meaningful? Obviously not, especially given that whether or not people actually get
down to gathering data in response to a problem perceived as calling for additional information, and the ways and means they choose for the purpose when they do, are contingent on an amalgam of factors. Indeed, in each and every information-need situation, the idiosyncratic cognitive and emotional/ affective attributes of the person concerned combine with his/her individual perceptions of the dictates of the specific circumstances on hand to form a unique problem recognition and resolution process. The most prominent among the host of factors, which may thus come into play in an informationneed situation, are related to: (1) work-roles and tasks; (2) personality traits; (3) gender; (4) age; (5) country of origin and cultural background; (6) information availability and accessibility; (7) information appetite and threshold; (8) time availability; (9) resources availability and costs.
