User information seeking behavior in a medical web portal environment: a preliminary study

  • Authors:

  • Dongming Zhang;Caroline Zambrowicz;Hong Zhou;Nancy K. Roderer

  • Affiliations:

  • Welch Medical Library, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Welch Medical Library, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Welch Medical Library, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Welch Medical Library, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology - Part I: Information seeking research
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The emergence of information portal systems in the past few years has led to a greatly enhanced Web-based environment for users seeking information online. While considerable research has been conducted on user information-seeking behavior in regular IR environments over the past decade, this paper focuses specifically on how users in a medical science and clinical setting carry out their daily information seeking through a customizable information portal system (MyWelch). We describe our initial study on analyzing Web usage data from My-Welch to see whether the results conform to the features and patterns established in current information-seeking models, present several observations regarding user information-seeking behavior in a portal environment, outline possible long-term user information-seeking patterns based on usage data, and discuss the direction of future research on user information-seeking behavior in the MyWelch portal environment.