Information Seeking in Electronic Environments

By Cshc Marchionini and Gary Marchionini

Book Overview

In the computer age, it is essential for individuals to develop skills and strategies for manipulating, storing, and retrieving electronic information. This book considers how electronic technologies have changed these skills and strategies and augmented the fundamental human activity of information seeking. Writing from the point of view of the user rather than the computer, the author makes a case for creating new interface designs that allow information seekers to choose what strategy to apply according to their immediate needs. Such systems may be designed by providing information seekers with alternative interface mechanisms for displaying and manipulating multiple levels of representation for information objects. This book is multidisciplinary in approach and aims to bridge the perspectives of information science, computer science and education. It will be essential reading for researchers and graduate students in these fields.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521586747
• ISBN13: 9780521586740
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A must-read for Information Science students and researchers

This is a very well-explicated book on humans' information-seeking strategies. Dr. Marchionini gives a very comprehensive view of this process that includes many enlightening ideas on how our strategies have co-evolved with the progress of information systems, and how they are interleaved with learning and other cognitive processes. I am a researcher in this field and I find this book extremely valuable as the author explains everything in jargon-free language with examples to support his arguments. Although this book was published in 1995, it is still very relevant now in 2009. I would recommend that the author revise the book in order to expand it and include some of the new social networking technologies that have had a significant impact on information-seeking in electronic environments.