Nora J. Bird

3rd year doctoral student

Rutgers University

School of Communication Information and Library Studies

4 Huntington St.

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

I would like to nominate risk and safety information seekers as a class of people for consideration by the SIGUSE Workshop. Science and the technologies that result from its study bring many risks and benefits to the public. Yet, it has been well-documented that people have a “school science” view of science phenomena – one that is bounded by science curricula and not how these phenomena impinge on their everyday lives. For instance, people learned about Mendel’s peas but now can’t relate this to genetic modification of agricultural products and its possible health and safety effects; or, for another example, nuclear fission was explained to them but now they don’t know how to evaluate the safety of siting a nuclear power plant in their neighborhood. The people facing these questions are not from a single demographic category, like children or the elderly; however, they can be considered together because they seek information in a domain, science and technology, with formidable cognitive and access barriers.

The study of this group is cross-disciplinary. Work in an area called the “public understanding of science” (Wynne, 1995) has shown that the meaning of science is constructed as people grapple with trying to make sense of information that is outside their experience. Some work has been done on expert scientist information behavior (Ellis, Cox, & Hall, 1993; Rieh, 2002) and also on the seeking of health information by everyday users (Johnson, 1997; Wikgren, 2001). These are pertinent to the situations that I describe above; however, risk and safety are a unique form of information seeking. In my own work, I have tried to look at how people use the web to learn about genetically modified food. I look forward to discussing how this work might be extended so that this user group may be better served.

Reference List

Ellis, D., Cox, D., & Hall, K. (1993). A comparison of the information seeking patterns of researchers in the physical and social sciences. Journal of Documentation, 49, 356-369.

Johnson, J. D. (1997). Cancer-related information seeking. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.

Rieh, S. Y. (2002). Judgment of information quality and cognitive authority in the web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science &Technology, 53, 145-161.

Wikgren, M. (2001). Health discussions on the Internet: A study of knowledge communication through citations. Library and Information Science Research, 23, 305-317.

Wynne, B. (1995). Public understanding of science. In S.Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen, & T. Pinch (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 361-388). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.