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How should we describe information-seeking behavior? What if we try this...

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Thanks for your interest in the student research behavior prototype application by Dan Wendling. This project uses individual interview data gathered on the University of Maryland campus in 2005 and 2006 by two sessions of the course Planning and Evaluating Library Services (LBSC 713), supervised by Neal Kaske, PhD. Here are a few basic concepts to aid your understanding of these results.

• Each student was asked what they did in their last course-related, and last non-course-related, search for information. We describe the results as their course-only path and the non-course-only path.
• Each path is comprised of sessions. A session began when the person started using a resource and ended when he/she stopped using that resource. If a person consulted with her/his advisor, then used the UMD catalog, then went to the stacks, that is recorded as 3 sessions. Some students stopped with one session; a few described 7 sessions. The form interviewers used, which is available on our web site, asked for 3 sessions: "What did you do first? What did you do second? What did you do third?"
• The university database system, ResearchPort, and Google, are considered to be gateway resources for this study, i.e., going to Google and then to one or more web sites is listed as one Google session.
• More information, including a 22-page paper about this project, is available from http://www.ponder-matic.com.
• (cc) Creative Commons License - Attribution-Share Alike / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/