Every library and information centre exists for one reason: to connect people with the information they need. But how do we know what users actually need, where they look for it, and whether they find it useful? The answer lies in information use studies. These are systematic investigations into how people seek, access, and use information in their work and daily lives. Over the decades, librarians and researchers have developed several distinct ways of studying information use, each focusing on a different angle. Understanding these types helps you see why a medical library looks nothing like a children’s section, and why a chemistry researcher and a history student approach the same catalogue in completely different ways.
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What information use studies set out to do
Before looking at the types, it helps to understand the purpose. Information use studies attempt to explain the information use phenomenon, to understand and predict user behaviour, and to improve services by adjusting the conditions under which people search. The field has deep roots. The study of information needs and behaviour is often traced back to the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, where several papers examined how scientists and technologists handled information. Since then, the focus has shifted dramatically. As research on library use and user studies shows, the discipline moved from a collection-centred approach to a firmly user-centred one, an idea that echoes Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science.
Researchers classify these studies in different ways depending on who is being studied, what profession they belong to, which subject they work in, and which sources they rely on. Let us look at each type.
User-based studies
User-based studies focus on categories of individuals defined by their role in an institution. The most common groups in an academic setting are students, researchers, and faculty members. The aim is to understand the information needs and seeking patterns of each group so that services can be tailored accordingly.
Students
Students form the largest user group in most academic libraries. Their information needs are usually tied to coursework, assignments, examinations, and project work. Undergraduate students often rely heavily on textbooks, lecture notes, and reference works, while postgraduate students begin to use journals, theses, and databases more actively. Studies of student behaviour frequently reveal a strong preference for quick, easily accessible online sources over physical browsing, a pattern that has grown sharper with the spread of smartphones and digital libraries.
Researchers
Researchers, including PhD scholars, have more specialised and continuous information needs. They depend on primary sources such as research papers, conference proceedings, data sets, and patents. Their behaviour tends to be systematic. A widely cited explanation of this is Ellis’s model, which describes activities such as starting, browsing, extracting, verifying, and ending a search. The models of information seeking behaviour show how researchers verify accuracy across multiple sources and tie up loose ends with a final search before they are satisfied.
Faculty members
Faculty members occupy a dual role. They need information both for teaching and for their own research, and they also guide students towards useful sources. Their needs span current awareness in their discipline, teaching materials, and high-quality scholarly literature. Studies often find that faculty value personal contacts and informal channels, such as discussions with colleagues, alongside formal sources like journals and databases.
Profession-based studies
Profession-based studies examine information use among practising professionals rather than within an academic role. Doctors, scientists, engineers, lawyers, journalists, and teachers all have distinct working environments that shape what information they need and how they get it. The value of these studies lies in designing specialised information services for each profession.
The medical profession is one of the most thoroughly researched. A well-known review of the information seeking behaviour of doctors organised the evidence into three themes: the information needs of doctors, how they seek information, and the sources they use. It found that face-to-face communication and printed evidence still played a strong role even as digital tools spread. A later review of physicians and nurses reported that the Internet, textbooks, journals, and colleagues were among the most frequently consulted sources, with online use rising as electronic health records became common.
Scientists, by contrast, lean heavily on journal articles, preprints, and conference papers, and they place a high premium on currency, that is, the most recent findings in their field. Teachers need curriculum materials, lesson resources, and pedagogical guidance, and they increasingly rely on open educational resources. A systematic review of clinical information seeking found that topics such as therapy, diagnosis, and epidemiology ranked highest among physicians’ needs, which shows just how profession-specific these patterns can be.
Subject-based studies
Subject-based studies analyse information use within a specific academic discipline rather than within a category of person. The logic here is that the structure of knowledge differs from one subject to another, and so does the way information is produced and consumed.
Take the sciences. In fields like physics, chemistry, and biology, the journal article is the central unit of communication, and information ages quickly, so users chase the latest publications. In the humanities, by contrast, the monograph or book remains crucial, older materials retain their value for far longer, and primary archival sources matter a great deal. The social sciences sit somewhere in between, drawing on a mix of journals, books, statistical data, and government reports.
These differences have practical consequences. A chemistry library needs strong database subscriptions and fast access to current journals, while a literature department needs a deep, well-preserved book collection. Subject-based studies often use techniques such as citation analysis and bibliometrics to map which sources a discipline depends on, an approach drawn from the broader toolkit of research methods in library and information science, where surveys, questionnaires, and descriptive statistics dominate.
Source-based studies
Source-based studies shift the focus from the user to the channel. Instead of asking who needs information, they ask which kinds of sources people turn to. Sources are commonly grouped into three broad categories: non-electronic, electronic, and oral.
Non-electronic sources
These are the traditional print and physical materials: books, journals, magazines, newspapers, reports, theses, and reference works such as encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Despite the digital shift, these remain important, especially in disciplines where books carry lasting value and in regions where reliable Internet access is still uneven. Studies of doctors, for example, repeatedly found textbooks and printed journals to be heavily used even alongside digital tools.
Electronic sources
Electronic sources include e-journals, e-books, online databases, institutional repositories, websites, and search engines. Their use has grown rapidly because they offer speed, remote access, and powerful searching. A review of information use over fifty years notes how the field shifted from physical libraries to digital environments and search engines, changing user behaviour fundamentally. The arrival of mobile devices and full-text databases has made electronic sources the default first stop for most users today.
Oral sources
Oral sources are people: colleagues, experts, teachers, and friends. These informal channels are often underestimated, yet many users prefer to ask a knowledgeable person before searching a database. This is sometimes called the “invisible college,” the informal network through which professionals share information. The studies of doctors and nurses confirmed that colleagues were among the most consulted sources, alongside printed and online material.
Real-world examples that shaped the field
Several landmark studies illustrate how these approaches work in practice. The medical literature offers some of the clearest cases. The review by Davies on doctors brought together a decade of evidence and remains a reference point for understanding clinical information needs. Such work directly informs how medical libraries stock resources and design services.
Outside the academic world, usability researchers have studied everyday online information seeking. A study by the Nielsen Norman Group identified three purposes behind online searches: acquiring a fact, comparing options to make a decision, and carrying out deeper research over days or weeks. This shows that even casual users follow recognisable patterns, and that the type of task changes how people behave.
Within India, INFLIBNET, the Information and Library Network Centre, has supported a large body of user studies through its e-content and research programmes. These build on classic frameworks such as Belkin’s Anomalous State of Knowledge model and Wilson’s model of information behaviour, both of which trace seeking behaviour back to an underlying need. Together, these examples demonstrate that information use studies are not abstract theory. They feed directly into collection development, library design, database selection, and user education.
How the types fit together
It is worth remembering that these categories overlap. A single study might examine doctors (profession-based) working in oncology (subject-based) who rely mainly on electronic databases (source-based). The classification is a lens, not a rigid box. Choosing the right lens depends on the question you want to answer. If you want to improve a college library, a user-based study of students may help most. If you want to design a hospital information service, a profession-based study of clinicians is more useful. The strength of the field lies in combining these perspectives to build a complete picture of how information flows from sources to the people who need it.
What do you think? If you were to design an information service for postgraduate science researchers in your institution, which type of study would you start with and why? And in your own academic life, do you lean more on electronic, non-electronic, or oral sources when you need an answer quickly?
References
- https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp15/chapter/library-use-and-user-studies/
- https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp15/chapter/models-of-information-seeking-behavior/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17584211/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hir.12036
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S138650561930187X
- https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/55098
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2007.00713.x
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-seeking-expectations/
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