Walk into any library and you will notice that everything-the arrangement of books, the cataloguing system, the reference desk, the digital databases-exists for one reason: to serve the people who walk through the door. These people are the users. In library and information science, understanding who these users are, what they need, and how they behave is not a side activity. It is the foundation on which good information services are built. This is exactly what user studies set out to explore.
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Who is a user?
A user is anyone who makes use of the resources or services an information system offers. Over the years, users have been called by many names-readers, patrons, clienteles, or customers-but the word “user” has become the standard term in the field. They form one corner of the classic trinity of a library: documents, users, and staff.
The most widely cited definition comes from Whitaker, who defines a user simply as a person who uses one or more of the services provided by a library. It is a clean, practical definition that covers everyone from a student borrowing a textbook to a researcher accessing an online journal.
Guinchat takes a more layered view. According to him, a user can be defined on the basis of two sets of criteria. The first set is objective criteria-things like the user’s socio-professional category, their specialist field, the nature of the activity for which information is being sought, and the reason for using the information system. The second set is social and psychological criteria-the user’s attitudes and values towards information in general, and the way they relate to the information unit in particular. For Guinchat, the heart of the matter is understanding why a person seeks information and how their professional and social behaviour shapes that search.
Different categories of users
Guinchat further groups users into three broad categories based on their stage in life and their information needs. The first group is users not yet engaged in active working life, such as students. The second group is users who have a job, where their information needs are tied directly to their work-think of engineers, doctors, or business managers. The third group is the ordinary citizen who needs general information for everyday living.
This categorisation matters because each group approaches information differently. A student preparing for an examination has very different needs from a practising lawyer searching for case law, and both differ from a homemaker looking up a government scheme. A library that treats all three the same way will end up serving none of them well.
Why user studies matter
A user study is a research method designed to understand how people interact with the services, resources, and facilities of an information system. The goal is to find out what users actually need, what they prefer, and how they behave-so that services can be shaped around real demand rather than guesswork.
Consider a simple example. A college library might assume its students want more printed reference books. But a user study-conducted through a survey or a set of interviews-might reveal that students actually want better access to online databases and find the existing e-resource platform hard to navigate. Without the study, the library would spend its budget in the wrong place. With it, the library can make an informed decision.
User studies help in several concrete ways. They reveal which resources are used most heavily, so collections can be strengthened where it counts. They expose gaps in service, such as overcrowded study rooms or confusing signage. They measure how satisfied users are with what is on offer. And they guide the sensible allocation of limited budgets. In a country where many libraries operate with tight resources, this kind of evidence-based decision-making is especially valuable.
Data for these studies is gathered through methods like questionnaires, interviews, focus group discussions, observation, and increasingly through usage analytics that track how digital resources are accessed. Each method captures a different slice of user behaviour, and a good study usually blends several together.
Historical perspectives
User studies did not appear overnight. They grew out of a wider concern about how scientific knowledge was being communicated and used.
The contribution of J.D. Bernal
The figure most strongly associated with the birth of formal user studies is J.D. Bernal, a physicist who thought deeply about the social role of science. His 1939 book, The Social Function of Science, argued that scientific knowledge should be organised and communicated so that society could actually benefit from it. This idea laid intellectual groundwork that the field would build on for decades.
Bernal’s most direct contribution came at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, held in London in 1948. The conference was convened after the Empire Scientific Conference of 1946 highlighted the need to re-examine how scientific information services worked. At this gathering, Bernal presented a paper titled “Preliminary Analysis of Pilot Questionnaire on the Use of Scientific Literature.” In it, he used a questionnaire to study how scientists actually used scientific literature-how they found papers, which journals they read, and how they kept up with their fields.
This is widely regarded as a turning point. For convenience, many scholars date the formal study of information users from this 1948 conference. Bernal shifted the focus from simply studying library systems to studying the behaviour and attitudes of information users themselves-a fundamental change in perspective.
The field broadens after 1948
It is worth noting that the roots go back further than 1948. Library surveys studying how people used libraries existed from around 1916, with a cluster of such studies in the 1920s and 1930s. But these earlier efforts focused on library systems rather than on the information needs of users in general. The Royal Society Conference is significant precisely because it broadened the lens.
The momentum continued. A decade later, in 1958, the International Conference on Scientific Information was held in Washington DC. Here Bernal presented another influential paper, “The Transmission of Information, a User’s Analysis,” in which he argued for a “natural historical” approach to studying users-a richer, more qualitative method to balance the heavily quantitative tone of the conference. Other researchers, such as Herbert Menzel at Columbia University and William Paisley, went on to produce major reviews of the field, almost all drawing on work from 1948 onwards.
Types of users
Beyond Guinchat’s social categories, there is another important way to classify users-based on their relationship to a particular information service. This framework recognises at least four distinct types of users, and understanding the difference between them is central to planning any service.
Potential user: This is a person who needs information that might be provided by a specific service, but who has not yet used it. The need exists, but for various reasons-lack of awareness, difficulty articulating the need, or barriers to access-it has not translated into actual use. Identifying potential users is important because they represent unmet demand.
Expected user: This is a person who is known to have the intention of using a certain information service. They are aware of the service and plan to use it, even if they have not done so yet. Services are often designed with this expected group clearly in mind.
Actual user: This is a person who has genuinely used an information service, regardless of whether they ended up benefiting from it. The actual user is the one whose behaviour can be directly observed and measured, which makes this group the easiest to study.
Beneficiary user: This is a person who has derived a measurable advantage from the information service. Not every actual user becomes a beneficiary-someone may use a service but gain nothing useful from it. The beneficiary is the ultimate test of whether a service is doing its job.
The gap between these categories tells a revealing story. A large number of potential users who never become actual users points to a problem-perhaps poor publicity or services that are hard to reach. A large number of actual users who never become beneficiaries points to a different problem-services that exist but do not deliver real value. Tracking the movement of people across these categories is one of the most useful things a user study can do.
Ranganathan’s categories
In the Indian context, S.R. Ranganathan offered his own grouping of users based on the types of reference service they require. He distinguished between the freshman or newcomer to the library, the ordinary inquirer, the specialist inquirer, and the general reader. Each type calls for a different level of guidance from library staff-the freshman needs orientation, while the specialist needs focused, in-depth assistance. This service-oriented classification fits neatly with Ranganathan’s broader philosophy that every reader should get their book and that the reader’s time should be saved.
The role of user studies in system design
All of this theory comes together at one practical point: designing information systems and services. A library catalogue, a digital repository, or a database is not built in a vacuum. It is built for people, and unless it matches the way those people actually search and think, it will fail to be used.
The identification of information needs is essential to the design of information systems. The effectiveness of any system depends on how closely the system’s characteristics match the real situation of its users, and on whether potential users are willing and able to use what is offered. A careful identification, analysis, and classification of the genuine information needs of users-including potential users and even non-users-forms the basis for planning, building, and running an information system. Any failure at the stage of identifying needs ripples through the entire system, weakening its efficiency.
This is the logic behind user-centred design, an approach that begins with the needs of the user-whether that user is an individual, a professional, a manager, or a policy maker-rather than with the technology. Systems built around user needs are far more likely to be adopted and used. Systems built around assumptions tend to reinforce old habits instead of meeting real demand.
In practice, this means that designing a useful information service is a continuous loop. A library identifies user needs through a study, designs or adjusts its services accordingly, observes how users respond, and then refines the system based on what it learns. User studies are not a one-time exercise carried out and forgotten; they are an ongoing conversation between the system and the people it serves. As user behaviour shifts-especially with the rapid move towards digital and mobile access-this conversation only becomes more important.
Bringing it together
User studies sit at the very centre of library and information science because every other activity in an information system ultimately revolves around the user. From Whitaker’s straightforward definition to Guinchat’s layered criteria, from Bernal’s pioneering questionnaire in 1948 to today’s data-driven analytics, the field has always asked the same fundamental question: who are we serving, and how can we serve them better? When we understand potential, expected, actual, and beneficiary users-and when we let that understanding shape the way we build our systems-we move from libraries that merely store information to libraries that genuinely meet human needs.
What do you think? If your own college or local library conducted a user study tomorrow, what unmet need do you think it would uncover about how you search for information? And in an age where so much information is just a search away, do you think the difference between an “actual” user and a “beneficiary” user is growing wider?
References
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/35348/5/Unit-12.pdf
- https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.1948.0001
- https://www.nature.com/articles/162279a0
- https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/1/3/959/96098/The-impact-of-J-D-Bernal-s-thoughts-in-the-science
- https://origin-archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla62/62-devf.htm
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6095075/
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