Contribution to the Study of Faculty Information Behaviour

Consistent with prior research into the information behaviour of faculty members (Case, 2012), the participants in this study frequently describe reliance on collegiate networks for the

satisfaction of their information needs. Participants experiencing the academic library as

content, for example, describe accessing content through the library that they have discovered, or identified for consumption, by recommendation or referral from colleagues and professional communications. Participants experiencing the library as ethics describe both acquiring content from and distributing content to colleagues when it is not readily available through the library. The findings of this research lend insight into how the library may relate to the flow of

information through these informal networks.

Research about faculty information behaviour has highlighted importance differences across scholarly disciplines, likely driven by the nature of information production, formats and distribution channels specific to those disciplines (Case, 2012). The findings of this study support this idea, as participants often mentioned the nature or format of information in relation to their discipline as an explanation for their needs and habits. The following quotations from participants working in different scholarly disciplines exemplify this:

“…our librarians are busy building up a physical library, which in [discipline] and related fields is important, because a lot of the stuff is not electronically available…” (Participant 1)

“…Since we are moving to an online world and all the journal articles are now online, that’s primarily what I need the library for, is the web portal….” (Participant 2) This suggests that despite trends towards digitization of scholarly materials and electronic publishing, in the year 2014 there still exist important differences in the nature of scholarly materials in different disciplines which influence both academic library practices and faculty information behaviours.

Another important insight from this study regards the uncertainty and unresolved questions which participants described arising in both the discovery and content categories. Excerpts from the data reveal that faculty sometime leave their questions and information needs unmet when they are not aware that assistance is available, are aware that assistance is available but do not want to ask for it, or determine that the need/question is not important enough to warrant additional effort in pursuing. The following quotations illustrate this:

“I think that, yeah I mean we rely a lot more on downloading something, you know looking on a database, downloading from there, and that’s again where I feel like there is hidden knowledge here that I wish, boy I wish somebody would teach me how to tap into that. But the problem is, you know to kind of just to lay the cards on the table, is once you’ve reached a certain level, you don’t want to admit to not knowing something. So there’s self-efficacy issues for everybody.” (Participant 4)

“…the [discipline] literature. Which is just terrifying to me. And a lot of it is in

[discipline], but there are so many things, so how do I structure in my mind – what are the best periodicals? What are the top, like most prestigious ones? You know, so I’m still not quite sure I get it, because I will need to break into this field at some point, but how and where, and how do I locate all the relevant stuff, it’s really intimidating…[are there] such services or assistance available for faculty?” (Participant 5)

“I was looking for some books earlier in the semester, and I thought I had located them in the library, and I came in and they weren’t there, and I just didn’t have time to follow up on it, and it wasn’t really that important to me at that point, but, I never did find

them…it said on the internet, on the website that it was available, and when I came to the stacks it wasn’t available. So I’m not sure if everything was accurate and updated on the website, or maybe I was just misreading…” (Participant 2)

In each case, the behaviour is that participants do not or have not yet pursued their information needs, however there appear to be a number of underlying causes. This data contributes to existing models of information behaviour, such as Kuhlthau’s information search process (1988) which focuses on the cognitive and affective aspects behind information behaviour.

Across the categories of experience, there is data which contributes to the principle of least effort theory of information behaviour (Case, 2012), as faculty members describe multiple instances where they pursue information needs outside of the academic library because it is faster and easier, while still being acceptably informative. Examples of this behaviour include the heavy reliance on collegiate networks mentioned above, as well as the use of unauthorized or potentially illegal information sharing practices and channels described through the library as ethics category of experience. These behaviours are exemplified across the participant set and do not appear to be constrained by scholarly discipline or other factors which typically sub- divide faculty information behaviour studies.

The findings of this research, in summary, reveal a number of consistencies with existing research of and theories about faculty member information behaviour, suggesting significant overlap in the factors that drive these behaviours between the faculty member participants in this study, who were all drawn from international branch campus contexts, and faculty member participants in prior research and studies. The exact details and manifestations of these

behaviours appear to be influenced by some contextually-specific factors, such as government censorship within branch campus settings and remoteness from physically accessible scholarly materials.