Abstract The essential characteristic of knowledge workers is that they use information to produce information subsequently. Hence, information seeking is a knowledge worker's central aspect of work life. In a corporate research laboratory environment, this is even more pronounced because the results produced are often in the form of more information, such as publications, tech reports, patent applications, or the embodiment of these into prototypes. The practices and expectations regarding information seeking and collaboration are fundamental to productive research in a corporate setting. To this end, a survey research project sampled researchers from selected labs of Hewlett Packard and Compaq Computer shortly after their merger. This survey examined researchers' usage of information sources, their preferred means of information seeking, and the types of information assets they produced. Findings indicated that participants relied heavily on the Internet and other Web‐based resources, more so than on their colleagues inside the company. Participants chose which information resources to use based on the time it took them to track down the information as well as the authoritativeness of the sources. Most information assets were generated collaboratively by teams rather then by individuals. Findings suggested that behavior was affected by the unstable environment resulting from the merger and the process of integrating the two research organizations.

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This study explores the relevance criteria and search strategies elementary school children applied when searching for information related to a class assignment in a school library setting. Students were interviewed on two occasions at different stages of the research process; field observations involved students thinking aloud to explain their search processes and shadowing as students moved around the school library. Students performed searches on an on-line catalog, an electronic encyclopedia, an electronic magazine index, and the World Wide Web. Results are presented for children selecting the topic, conducting the search, examining the results, and extracting relevant results. A total of 254 mentions of relevance criteria were identified, including 197 references to textual relevance criteria that were coded into nine categories and 57 references to graphical relevance criteria that were coded into five categories. Students exhibited little concern for the authority of the textual and graphical information they found, based the majority of their relevance decisions for textual material on topicality, and identified information they found interesting. Students devoted a large portion of their research time to finding pictures. Understanding the ways that children use electronic resources and the relevance criteria they apply has implications for information literacy training and for systems design.

Searching information retrieval systems is a highly interactive, iterative process that cannot be understood simply by comparing the output of a search session (the “search product”) to a query stated in advance. In this article, we examine evaluation goals and methods for studying information retrieval behavior, drawing examples from our own research and that of others. We limit our review to research that employs online monitoring, also known as transaction log analysis. Online monitoring is one of few methods that can capture detailed data on the search process at a reasonable cost; these data can be used to build quantitative models or to support qualitative interpretations of quantitative results. Monitoring is a data collection technique rather than a research design, and can be employed in experimental or field studies, whether alone or combined with other data collection methods. Based on the research questions of interest, the researcher must determine what variables to collect from each data source, which to treat as independent variables to manipulate, and which to treat as dependent variables to observe effects. Studies of searching behavior often treat search task and searcher characteristics as independent variables and may manipulate other independent variables specific to the research questions addressed. Search outcomes, time, and search paths frequently are treated as dependent variables. We discuss each of these sets of variables, illustrating them with sample results from the literature and from our own research. Our examples are drawn from the Science Library Catalog project, a 7-year study of children's searching behavior on an experimental retrieval system. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of these results for the design of information retrieval systems. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.