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Investigation of information encountering
in the controlled research environment
Sanda Erdelez
*
School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri––Columbia,
221H Townsend Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Received 5 October 2002; accepted 6 February 2004
Available online 20 March 2004
Abstract
Experimental research of opportunistic acquisition of information (OAI) is difficult to design due to the overall
opacity of OAI to both the information users and to the researchers. Information encountering (IE) is a specific type of
OAI where during search for information on one topic information users accidentally come across information related
to some other topic of interest. Building on our prior descriptive investigation of IE, we developed a conceptual
framework that explains IE as stopping of information seeking activities for a foreground problem due to noticing,
examining, and capturing of information related to some background problem. With objective to evoke IE in users’
information behavior and record users’ actions during an IE episode, we created a controlled laboratory situation,
intended to trigger participants’ experience of IE during an information retrieval task. We report about the method-
ological challenges experienced in this effort and share lessons learned for future experimental studies of opportunistic
acquisition of information.
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Information behavior; Information encountering; Information seeking; Opportunistic acquisition of information; User
studies; World Wide Web
1. Introduction
Traditionally, the focus of user studies in library and information science (LIS) research has been di-
rected to understanding a user’s purposive pursuit of information, often described as information seeking.
However, there is research-driven and anecdotal evidence that information users often find interesting and
useful information without purposeful application of information searching skills and strategies. These
experiences can be labeled as opportunistic acquisition of information (OAI). The experiences of OAI are
especially abundant in today’s information-intensive environment because it emphasizes users’ mobility and
*
Tel.: +1-573-882-5088; fax: +1-573-884-4944.
E-mail address: sanda@missouri.edu (S. Erdelez).
0306-4573/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2004.02.002
Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
www.elsevier.com/locate/infoproman
facilitates disappearance of traditional task-oriented silos in acquisition of information. In this new
environment users can move efficiently among information that is pertinent to their various life-situations
and consequently find information relevant to their problem or interest areas when they are not pur-
posefully seeking that specific information.
Information seeking research relies on a rich selection of empirical data collection methods such as
questionnaires, interviews, activity logs, and experiments. Many of these methods involve real-time
observation of users’ behaviors. OAI, in contrast, involves unpredictable actions that are difficult to observe
in a research setting. These actions are typically non-intentional and very short in duration, which makes
them difficult for users to recall and reflect upon in post-fact research designs. Users’ experiences of OAI
come when they are not expected and involve cognitive processes without overt observable actions, which
limits the efficiency of naturalistic, real-time observations.
Due to the above explained opacity of users’ OAI, there is a limited usefulness of research designs that
involve the participants’ full awareness of the study objectives, i.e., designs where participants know in
which type of information behavior the researcher is interested in. A plausible solution for observing OAI
in a research setting may be a research design that exposes the participant to situations that may evoke
OAI, without him or her knowing that OAI is the object of study. In this paper we discuss the method-
ological challenges in development of such a research design and present findings based on an exploratory
study of OAI in a controlled research environment.
2. Background
Human information behavior (HIB) is a complex, umbrella concept for ‘‘totality of human behavior in
relation to sources and channels of information’’ (Wilson, 2000, p. 49). One aspect of HIB, information
acquisition, comprises various ways in which people find information. While the dominant interest of user
studies in the LIS literature has been information seeking, one can also find references to opportunistic
aspects of human information acquisition. For example, Krikelas (1983) uses the concept of ‘‘casual
information gathering;’’ Marchionini (1995) sees the information seeking process as both systematic and
opportunistic; and Wilson (2000) makes a distinction between active and passive information seeking.
Additional support for OAI as an aspect of human behavior also comes from cognitive science, where
traditional notions about dominance of deliberate and rational cognitive processes in human activity are
challenged with situated action models (Suchman, 1987). These emergent models ‘‘recognize the oppor-
tunistic and flexible way people engage in real activity’’ (p. 72).
Among the LIS professionals OAI is commonly referred to as serendipity in library research and has been
reported by authors such as, Celoria (1969), Rice (1988), and Liestman (1992). These authors suggest that
libraries create a rich environment for serendipitous discovery of information due to the ways information is
presented in card catalogs and online public access catalogs (OPACs). Despite plentiful anecdotal evidence
for OAI in libraries, Liestman (1992) explains that casual serendipity by library patrons may not be an
attractive research topic because it lacks the ‘‘eureka effect’’ that is typically associated with serendipity in
scientific discovery. He also observes that our culture favors activities that are rational and systematic;
therefore, information users may not tell others about serendipitous experiences that occurred in a library.
Recently there has been an emerging interest in systematic investigation of OAI, fueled by a desire to
create a more holistic understanding of human information behavior and by awareness that the modern
electronic environment is especially conducive to OAI. Empirical study of various aspects of OAI has been
reported by Erdelez (1995, 1997, 2000), Erdelez and Rioux (2000), Foster and Ford (2003), Miwa (2000),
Ross (1999), Toms (1998, 2000a, 2000b), and Williamson (1998). These research efforts have focused pri-
marily on identification, description, and definition of the OAI and have examined it from the perspective
of different user populations and information environments, such as academic users, senior citizens, Web
1014 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
users, etc. Additional important contribution of the above works is in proposing ‘‘technical’’ terms that
would convey the meaning of OAI with more precision than the popular concept of ‘‘serendipity’’. Among
the terms that have been proposed are: information encountering (Erdelez), accidental discovery of
information (Williamson), information source encountering (Miwa), and serendipitous information re-
trieval (Toms).
A majority of the empirical studies of OAI relied on user’s self-reporting (e.g., surveys, in-depth inter-
views, information logs) as the primary data collection method. To our knowledge, Toms (2000b) was the
first among LIS researchers to observe ‘‘serendipitous encounters with information’’ in a context of an
experimental study. While experimentally evaluating browsability of two types of search interfaces for
hypertext newspapers, she noticed that one of the interfaces provided respondents with more rewarding
opportunities for chance encounters of information than the other. Outside of the LIS field, Campos and
Figueiredo (2001) report on an effort to create a software agent (Max) that stimulates serendipity.
2.1. Conceptual framework
An important challenge of the research design for a study of OAI in a controlled environment is the
question of how to ensure that subjects experience an unexpected appearance of OAI during a research
session. This problem with research design is deeply rooted in the conceptual understanding of what OAI is
and how it relates to the human acquisition of information.
While the concept of opportunistic discovery of information is still not well defined, in order to facilitate
the study research design it was necessary to identify the scope of OAI. One type of OAI occurs in situ-
ations when a user actively seeks information related to one problem and unexpectedly finds information
related to some other problem, e.g., a student conducts a Web search for her Anthropology paper and finds
information relevant to finding an apartment. Based on Erdelez (1997), we call these experiences infor-
mation encountering (IE). In more recent work, Erdelez (2000) proposed that a typical IE episode consists
of the following functional elements:
•Noticing––the perception of encountered information.
•Stopping––the interruption of the initial information seeking activity.
•Examining––the assessment of usefulness of the encountered information.
•Capturing––the extraction and saving of the encountered information for future use.
•Returning––the reconnection with the initial information seeking task.
These elements may not be present in each IE episode, and the mode of their fulfillment will depend on
the characteristics of the specific information environment. Fig. 1 is a simplified graphical presentation of
an IE episode. It shows that IE is imbedded within a process of information seeking and illustrates the
presence of individual functional elements of IE.
The second conceptual issue relevant for the design of the study is identification of the relationship
between IE (as a selected representation of opportunistic acquisition of information) and information
acquisition in general. We hypothesize that an occurrence of IE is facilitated by parallel presence of various
situations in people’s everyday lives that can be defined very broadly as ‘‘problems’’. In simplified terms,
these problems become translated into information needs and then into various forms of acquisition of
information. At any point in time a person will have a number of discreet problems (on various subjects,
with various levels of specificity, urgency, complexity, etc.) and information needs based on these prob-
lems. However, due to the limitations of human perceptual system that is engaged when people seek
information, and priorities people assign to their problems, a person typically attends only to one problem
at a time.
S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025 1015
For example, in a specific point in time the student from the above presented scenario may be focused on
searching for information relevant to the Anthropology paper (problem in the foreground). The need for
information about finding an apartment, as well as information relevant to any other problem (problems in
the background) that the student may have, is not being actively addressed at that time. During infor-
mation encountering a transition occurs that reverses the positions of the foreground and background
problems. The apartment-related information captures student’s attention and the Anthropology paper is
pushed temporarily to the background.
The recognition that users at any time hold many problems, the confining nature of attention focus
during information seeking, and the transition from the foreground to the background problem during an
IE episode, provided the three key conceptual elements for design of the study reported in this paper. We
created a research design intended to address the following research objectives:
1. To evoke an episode of information encountering in a controlled research environment, and
2. To identify the functional elements of an IE episode evoked in a controlled research environment.
3. Method
The overall objective of the study was to evaluate the potential for investigating information encoun-
tering (IE), as a type of opportunistic acquisition of information (OAI) in a controlled research environ-
ment. The research design was guided by the conceptualization of IE as user’s transition from information
seeking related to a foreground problem to accidental discovery of information related to some background
problem. We decided to create a research design where (1) both foreground and background problem are
controlled for a group of users, and (2) where an ‘‘IE trigger’’ is imbedded within the information seeking
activities for the foreground task with a hope it would induce respondents’ experiences of information
encountering.
Fig. 1. A graphical representation of an event of information encountering within an activity of information seeking.
1016 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
3.1. The research design
A typical IE episode starts with information searching for a foreground problem, which leads one to
notice IE trigger and eventually encounter information related to some background problem. In order to
prepare the research setting for the study, we ‘‘reverse-engineered’’ the above process by:
1. Identifying a group of potential study participants with a common, known task that served as a back-
ground problem.
2. Identifying an IE trigger that would lead respondents to encounter information related to a background
problem in the controlled research conditions.
3. Creating a ‘‘cover task’’ for the study (based on the IE trigger) that is presented to the respondents and
serves as the foreground problem.
The group of participants identified for the study consisted of graduate students enrolled in a library and
information science course in Business Information Resources. The course was taught by the researcher
who was, therefore, well informed about the nature and the timing of students’ information needs related to
the course. As a part of the course requirements, the students had an assignment to conduct research and
write a marketing report about the Web analytics industry. One of the specific questions in the assignment
was the size of the market for Web analytics software applications. The assignment was due approximately
two weeks after the time planned for the study reported here.
Next, we needed an IE trigger that would appear as a false drop in the list of result hits, which the study
participants will receive when searching for information for the foreground problem. A false drop can be
defined as ‘‘an instance of the search term in the retrieval set, which is ‘out of context’, given the searcher’s
intentions’’ (Brown-Syed, 1999). In order to find a suitable false drop for our study we conducted a simple
GoogleTM search with ‘‘Web analytics’’ as a search term. We reviewed a dozen of screens from over 100,000
result hits, looking for records containing terms that could lead us to a meaningful cover task and a related
IE trigger for the study. From several potential candidates we selected the following one (presented here in
the form it appeared in GoogleTM ):
Title: Advertising News (Page 10/27)
URL: http://biz.yahoo.com/n/y/y0000-10/html
Description: Web Analytics Market Increases 200... Key Findings: Seniors are Surfing, Right on Target,
PC... 33 am; Products: Motorola. Surfboard cable. modem.
The above item included a reference to a Web analytics market (information needed for the background
problem) and also mentioned the term ‘‘surfboard’’. This term was used as a key for creation of a cover task
(foreground problem) as described below.
We invited respondents to participate in a study of how people search for information while shopping
online and assigned them a cover task to shop for a surfboard. Because students are often selected pop-
ulation for studies about online shopping, it was reasonable to believe that the cover study itself would not
bring any suspicions about our underlying intentions to study IE.
3.2. Setup of the search environment
The study was conducted in a hypertext search environment, which at its front end had a look and feel of
a Web search engine interface. Web has been identified as an environment conducive to information
encountering (Erdelez, 2000). It covers topically very heterogeneous information, therefore, when people
S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025 1017
use a Web search engine to find information on a specific topic, they commonly get many false drops in
their lists of hits.
We used Microsoft Access to design a small database with a total of 50 records. Forty-nine records were
in some way relevant to the foreground task, e.g., finding information about buying a surfboard, surfing,
and shopping for sports equipment in general. These records were selected from a list of GoogleTM search
hits and copied into the database in order to preserve their original appearance. All the records had a live
link to URLs provided. Following is an example of a record included in the database:
Title: Robert August Surfboards
URL: http://www.robertaugust.com/
Description: Long boards, shirts, shorts, trunks, fins, skate boards, learning videos, board bags and hats.
The one remaining record was the IE trigger provided above.
The database was searchable through a simple Web search engine-like interface. It included short
instructions about the cover study tasks the respondent were expected to perform and a search window.
The instructions stated as follows:
Imagine that you would like to buy a surfboard. What search terms from the list provided below
would you use to retrieve hits from a typical Web search engine? Search terms: shop, shopping,
buy, buying, surf, board, surfboard, how, web, sports. In your search, you can use a maximum of
two words from the list provided.
After series of pre-tests, we decided to limit the choice of search terms in order to provide better con-
trol over the number and type of records that respondents could retrieve. The study database was set up so
that each respondent would get at least a screen full of items. The items were retrieved based on the
presence of search terms selected by the respondents. Each list of retrieved items also included the item
designated as the ‘‘IE trigger,’’ which was pre-set to always appear as the fourth record on the list (see
Fig. 2).
We did not share the information about the structure and the actual small size of the database with the
study participants. They were, therefore, left to make their own conclusions about the size of the infor-
mation space in which their search activity was performed.
3.3. Study participants
Ten students (eight females and two males) from a class of 25 LIS business information students par-
ticipated in the study. As it was explained above, the course was taught by the researcher. The study
participants responded to a call for a study of online shopping behavior (the cover study) that was dis-
tributed by a fellow graduate student, supposedly as a part of her class-related research project.
Unknowingly to the study participants, the graduate student was actually assisting the researcher with the
controlled study of information encountering. In return for participation in the study the students were
each rewarded a $20 book gift certificate.
3.4. Data collection procedures
The study participants were scheduled to attend individual data collection sessions in an office-type
research laboratory that included a personal computer with a Web browser. The research sessions lasted
between 15 and 25 minutes.
1018 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
During the sessions the respondents were introduced to the purpose of the cover study and received
instructions to complete:
1. A short electronic survey with demographic questions and question about the extent of their online shop-
ping experience––the purpose of this activity was to emulate the characteristics of a typical research
study and to ‘‘ease’’ the respondents into the cover study.
2. A search task related to the online shopping study (shopping for a surfboard)––this activity addressed
the information searching for the foreground problem and involved the appearance of the IE trigger
among the retrieved search hits. Following the search task the respondents were asked to rate the poten-
tial relevance of individual records retrieved in response to the search task. We instructed respondents to
read the short descriptions of the hits provided by the search engine and by using a pen and paper form,
assign a relevance score 1–5 to each retrieved item. The purpose of relevance assessment task was to
bring the presence of the embedded IE trigger to respondent’s attention.
3. An exit survey––in this activity the respondents were asked to complete a short, self-administered,
paper survey about their potential information encountering experience related to Web analytics infor-
mation (see Appendix A). The objective of the exit survey was to find out if participants were able to
Search terms: surfboard, buying
List of Items retrieved:
1. Title: Evolution Surf ™ - Custom Performance Surfboards & Quality ...
URL: www.evolutionsurf.com/main.html
Description: Shop online for custom surfboards , quality surfgear and
apparel . Surfboards are custom shaped. register, ...
2. Title: Tactics Boardshop: Snowboard Skateboard Surfboard Store
URL: www.boardtactics.com/
Description:... Tactics is your online snow, skate, and surf shop. ... the
best snowboards, bindings, and outerwear to skateboards, shoes,
sandals, surfboards , boardshorts, and ...
3. Title: Quickboards.........surfboards , used surfboards , surfing
equipment ...
URL: www.qboards.com/surfshop/
Description:... of surfing goods with the name brands you want along
with low prices, we have integrated our shopping cart system ... Largest
Selection of Used Surfboards on Earth ...
4. Title: Advertising News (Page 10/27)
URL: http://biz.yahoo.com/n/y/y0000 -10/html
Description: Web Analytics Market Increases 200… Key Findings: Seniors are
Surfing, Right on Target, PC… 33 am; Products: Motorola. Surfboard cable.
Shopping for modem.
5. Title: Quicksilver Surfboard Shop
URL: www.waves -surf.com/Quicksilver/ Quicksilver_Surfboard.asp
Description:... Surfshop is perfect for online shopping Quicksilver
Surfboard; Quicksilver Surfboard surfers will love this site; ... Quicksilver
Surfboard Shop. ...
Embedded
IE Trigger
record
Fig. 2. An example of the list of retrieved items with embedded information encountering trigger record.
S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025 1019
perceive the IE trigger and also to capture their follow-up actions and their thoughts about this experi-
ence.
To extent it was feasible; the above data collection instruments were individually pre-tested for clarity
and comprehension.
4. Findings
All ten participants successfully completed the assigned tasks for the cover study. The data collected for
the cover study will not be presented here because they are not relevant to the real objective of the IE study
reported in this paper.
The exit survey provided an insight into how the study participants responded to an attempt to trigger
their information encountering in a controlled research setting. In response to the closed question #2 (Did
you notice that one of the item descriptions on the list of the hits included information about ‘‘Web Analytics
Market Share,’’ related to your assignment in the business information resources class?) nine of the ten
participants provided a positive answer.
From the participants’ answers to open-ended question #3 (Describe what came to your mind and how
you felt when you noticed the information about Web analytics.) we learned that one participant remembered
seeing a record about the Web analytics market but did not connect it with the assignment from the
business information class. The responses from the eight remaining respondents indicated that they did
make that connection. Two among these eight respondents (#2 and #8) also shared their views about why
false drops are possible when searching the Web:
#2––This has nothing to do with surfboard shopping but the engine must have picked up on some part
of the terms to pick up the result.
#8––I felt that the link probably was made due to the multiple meaning of ‘‘surf’’. I assumed the con-
tent of the site was about tracking customers rather than surfboards. It made me feel that the com-
puter had not done what I instructed it to.
Based on instrument pre-testing we identified that respondents’ capability to notice the IE trigger about
the Web analytics market may be influenced by the level of detail they devote to reading the retrieved list of
hits during the task of relevance evaluation. In response to closed-ended question (#1) about the ap-
proaches the participants used in order to rank the hits in the surfboard shopping exercise we received the
following answers:
•Two respondents said that they read only the titles,
•Four skimmed the short description, and
•Four read each description, word by word.
Among the respondents who skimmed the abstracts was the only respondent who did not remember
noticing the record with information about the Web analytics market.
In response to closed question #4 (What was the first thing you did immediately after noticing the Web
analytics information?) all nine respondents who recalled noticing Web analytics information continued
performing the tasks assigned in the cover study. They did not stop to investigate the link for the Web
analytics market; they did not stop to write down the URL, nor did they in any other way attempt to
capture the link for future use. However, two participants reported a strong desire to examine the link with
reference to Web analytics, but resisted the urge to do it:
1020 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
#9––I though it (sic) odd that computer software would come up because sports was one of my terms.
In a normal environment (not taking a survey), I would have clicked on that link to check it out.
#5––...I regret I didn’t write down the URL (about Web analytics) for future reference.
Upon the completion of the exit-survey the respondent #5 returned to her initial search and wrote down
the URL for the Web analytics information.
The open-ended question (#5), which asked for comments about the exit survey, revealed several
interesting observations. Among the four respondents who shared their comments, two expressed confusion
about the purpose of the study:
#5––O.K., but now I’m wondering why was the web analytics site there...
#7––It really makes me wonder what this study is about.
Only one participant shared a concern that the original study was ‘‘engineered’’ by the researcher:
#6––I thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if they really got that result from a search engine, or whether they
planted it there because of our assignment’. I also thought it was weird how you start to notice things
only after you’ve been exposed to them.
The potential meaning and implications of these findings will be discussed in more detail in the following
section of this paper.
5. Discussion
As reported in the findings above, all respondents but one out of ten participating in the study
remembered noticing the IE trigger. Among the nine who recalled noticing the IE trigger, one did not make
a cognitive connection between the trigger and the background problem (assignment about Web analytics
market). None of the eight respondents who reported making that connection stopped the search activity
for the foreground problem to assess the information related to the background problem or save it for
future access and use. The comments of one respondent indicate that the research context of the foreground
task made him resist the urge to further examine encountered link. Another respondent captured the
encountered link by returning to it after the study (as she perceived it) was completed.
5.1. Evoking an IE episode
Despite careful conceptualization and execution of the research design our study did not succeed in
fulfilling the its first objective––to evoke under controlled research conditions a ‘‘complete’’ IE episode.
While the majority of study participants exhibited noticing, and one performed capturing, none of them
performed stopping,examining,orreturning during their research sessions. First plausible explanation for
this is that the research-context of the cover story may have increased the motivation of the participants to
stay focused on the foreground task and therefore suppressed their natural information encountering
behavior. While one respondent specifically reported this situation, it might have been present in the
behavior of other participants, too.
Another potential reason that participants did not experience a complete IE episode might have been the
artificial nature of the foreground problem. As it was explained before, only the background problem
S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025 1021
(information needed for assignment on Web analytics) involved the respondents’ real information need.
The foreground problem (the online shopping study about surfboards) was artificially reverse-engineered in
order to fit to the item identified as the IE trigger. A better approach, while more difficult to design, might
be to select a foreground problem that is ‘‘self-generated’’ (Gross, 1999) by the respondent. In such way the
content of the cover study may be more meaningful to the respondents and inspire their deeper involvement
with the task-at-hand.
Furthermore, the anticipation of participant response to the cover task is just as relevant as the selection
of the topic of the foreground problem. For example, in this study, the participants were asked to assess the
relevance of the hits received in response to their query about surfboard shopping. They were specifically
instructed to base their relevance solely on the content of the descriptions that were provided for retrieved
items. As reported in the findings, these straightforward instructions (at least from researcher’s perspective)
resulted in three types of respondents’ approaches to evaluating the presented content––looking for rele-
vant words only in provided titles, skimming the abstracts for relevant words, and reading the abstracts
word by word. The exploratory scope of the study did not allow us to further evaluate the impact of these
different approaches on respondents’ ability to notice the IE trigger.
5.2. The functional elements of an IE episode
The most valuable study findings pertain to the ‘‘noticing’’ element of an IE episode. Our initial
understanding of noticing as a simple point where the user perceives an IE trigger and starts the episode of
information encountering was expanded with the following hypotheses:
(a) The users’ perception (seeing, recalling) of an IE trigger does not necessarily mean they become cogni-
tively connected to the background problem, even when such a connection appears to be obvious to a
researcher;
(b) Users may establish a cognitive connection between the IE trigger and their background problem, but
decide not to change the focus in their information activities from foreground to background problem;
and
(c) Users may perceive the IE trigger, connect it with the background problem, divert from foreground to
background problem, and move to the next functional element of information encountering.
The first two among the about three situations were reported in our study.
Noticing that is not followed by stopping and examining is an exclusively cognitive activity that shows no
or very little overt behavioral evidence. More sensitive data collection tools and procedures are needed to
capture very subtle changes in shifting of users’ attention. The eye tracking technology, which we are
currently evaluating, holds a promise to facilitate such research efforts.
As it was reported above, during the research sessions conducted with our study respondents we did not
record any presence of either stopping, examining, or returning. One respondent, however, captured the
encountered information for future use after the research session was completed. Based on this experience
we learned additional important lessons:
(a) The artificial nature of the controlled research design may influence respondents to temporarily skip the
functional elements of IE that may be perceived as ‘‘overt’’ (stopping,examining,capturing,andreturn-
ing) and not appropriate given the context of the cover study. At some later, convenient time, when they
are not under research conditions, the participants may recreate their search strategy for the foreground
problem in order to examine and capture information that was noticed. These actions, of course, will be
possible only if the respondent has an extended access to the information environment that was used in
the cover study.
1022 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
(b) In a study of OAI a researcher needs to be careful about what is considered to be a ‘‘research session.’’
The respondents’ actions immediately following the completion of the cover study need to be closely
monitored in order to record presence of delayed capturing. Also, one-time study session may be re-
placed with two or more separate research sessions that would provide more data collection points.
5.3. Methodological suggestions for future research
Our study confirmed that controlled research of OAI is confronted with many methodological chal-
lenges. The study also identified several variables that may facilitate future experimental research of IE and
other types of OAI.
1. Information user.
2. Information environment.
3. Foreground problem.
4. Background problem.
This framework includes variables similar to those discussed by Tague-Sutcliffe (1992) in the context of
information retrieval experimentation. However, instead of having only one variable that identifies the
user’s problem for which the relevance of retrieved documents is evaluated (foreground problem) our
framework also includes an additional variable for the problem area where information may be encoun-
tered (background problem).
Future experimental studies of IE and OAI could impose various levels of control regarding each of the
four variables. User-related variables might be controlled for individual differences, such as openness to
information as indicated in the recent work by Heinstr€
om (2003). The information environment might be
controlled for conduciveness to IE, such as affordances of the environment for noticing and managing
encountered information. Furthermore, both foreground and background problem may be controlled
according to a number of potentially relevant dimensions such as urgency, importance, perceived com-
plexity, etc.
We envision creation of a specialized Web-based software application that will allow the researcher to
interactively adjust individual elements of the above presented research variables for the study of OAI.
Such a software application would provide participants in an OAI study an interface that has the look-and-
feel and navigational capabilities of popular search engines. From the administrative view, the application
would facilitate maximum research control and flexibility regarding the content and presentation of the IE
trigger.
6. Conclusions
We created a research design that relied on an IE trigger to induce an episode of IE in the information
behavior of the 10 study participants in a controlled research environment. In the participants’ actions
following the response to IE trigger, we hoped to identify presence of the functional elements of an IE
episode (noticing, stopping, examining, capturing, and returning). While we failed to fully accomplish the
above objective, the study provided an initial insight into participants’ reaction to a controlled study of IE
and a first-hand experience with practical challenges of its research design.
Skeptics may argue that the artificial nature of a controlled research environment presents an insur-
mountable obstacle for observation of IE and other natural processes of OAI. We believe that this obstacle
can be overcome with very careful planning, high attention to detail, and ongoing adjustments in a
development and execution of a research design. By focusing our research efforts on the methodological
S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025 1023
issues in the study of OAI, we hope to contribute to the development of a research environment that
facilitates inquiry into the aspects of human information behavior that may be difficult to study by tra-
ditionally approaches available in LIS user studies research. Development of new methodologies, in turn,
may contribute to more complete understanding of human information behavior and to the design of more
user-centered information systems.
Appendix A
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EXIT SURVEY
Task 3
Your Name:
Please answer the following questions:
1. Which of the following options best describe the approach you used to rank the hits in the surfboard
shopping exercise?
(a) I read the titles of the hits looking for relevant words.
(b) I skimmed the description, looking only for words relevant to the task at hand.
(c) I read each description word by word.
(d) Other:
2. Did you notice that one of the item abstracts on the list of hits included information about ‘‘Web
Analytics Market Share’’, related to your assignment in the business information resources class?
(a) NO (stop here, you’ve finished the Exit survey)
(b) YES
3. Describe what came to your mind and how you felt when you noticed the abstract with Web
analytics:
4. What was the first thing you did immediately after noticing the Web analytics information?
(a) I continued with the surfboard shopping exercise.
(b) I clicked on the link that showed Web analytics in the abstract, to check it out.
(c) I wrote down the URL for Web analytics information to check it out later.
(d) Other:
5. Your comments about this Exit Survey:
1024 S. Erdelez / Information Processing and Management 40 (2004) 1013–1025
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