Promoting by Expertise : A Study on Information Search and Usage in Geographical Research as an Instrument for Marketing Librarianship

Abstract

Information seeking and usage in scientific research is an extremely complex process which consists of an enormous variety of methods, tactics and particularly tacit knowledge. The process of information seeking is strongly connected to the process of information usage and finally to the process of producing new scientific knowledge – a process in which a search becomes research. This paper clings into the geographical research and its’ processes from the information studies point of view. Our paper is partly based on questionnaires which we are planning to arrange in the traditional Geographer’s Symposium in Helsinki late October in 2006. The questionnaire includes questions concerning mostly information sources used in geographical research but also some questions about information seeking tactics and methods used in the process of scientific research. The role of library in a scientific research process is often quite vague to a researcher and even to the information specialists such as librarians. Libraries’ task is to provide information resources for the users. Researchers use the information resources located in some web service. The libraries and the thousands of hours of work behind the visible resources remain invisible from the researchers’ point of view. There are two possible goals in our paper. First goal is to make an effort to show how important it is to promote the expertise of information specialists and to represent one example of doing it. If our research gives us a better understanding of scientific researchers needs and usage of information it will surely lead to a path to better and userfriendly information services. The second goal in our research is to reveal the expertise behind all the sophisticated information services used by the scientific research community.