Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design

by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis's - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as `updating' (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis's model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IPM
• Authors: Stephann Makri, Ann Blandford, Anna Louise Cox
• Keywords: Broad-scoped Design Insights, Information-seeking Behaviours, IPM 2008, Similar Information-seeking Behaviours