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Fifty years of information behavior research

T.D. Wilson is professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield, UK. He can be reached by email at t.d.wilson<at>shef.ac.uk W hen I was asked to write about 50 years of information behavior research, I initially quailed, partly because I had written a similarly titled piece 15 years ago [1] and was reluctant to go over the same ground again and partly because finding a way through the volume of material is not exactly a trivial task. However, a smaller piece than the previous was required, and I finally agreed. I have tried to draw attention to investigations which, I believe, any researcher new to the field ought to be aware of. Inevitably, because of my background, there is something of a UK bias in this report, but sometimes this inclination is justified by the fact that major, nationwide studies were carried out in the United Kingdom, which were not replicated elsewhere. I hope the reader will find any bias irrelevant to the overall picture. What did the library and information research world look like in 1959? Very different from today, certainly. Although the computer had been invented some time previously, it was not in general use for the handling of information. In fact, in that year, I was running an information unit in the nuclear energy industry and, knowing of the early work on computer-based indexes, I visited the computer services division and talked to them about a possible replacement for the optical coincidence card system I was using. (This employment, in itself, was novel: that system was only the third such in the United Kingdom at the time.) The computer manager came along to my office to see the system in use and, after a demonstration, looked thoughtfully into the big box containing the cards, shook his head and said, “No, we couldn’t do any better than that!” Over the past 50 years the computer scientists have certainly discovered how to do better, and today, information retrieval without the computer is almost inconceivable. Clearly, the widespread use of computers and, more recently, the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web have completely transformed the way information is handled in many disciplines and how many ordinary people, as well as scholars and researchers, now think of gathering information.