Duggan and Julien's "Longitudinal analysis" is an empirical study that tested the claims by other researchers: Is information behavior multidisciplinary? what are the methods of the studies?, and Are these studies dealing with cognitive activities? They created content analysis categories in which to place literature published between 1984-1989 and 1995-1998.
While it seems like they did extensive research to determine if articles could apply to library science or information behavior, it is possible that Duggan et al. missed some sources, which would skew their results. As this paper was published more than 10 years ago, certain resources were not available to Duggen. A follow-up to this paper would be interesting; even if new search engines and databases don't make a difference in the ease of locating and categorizing documents, there certainly have been more work published that might change their results.
However, the results that Duggan did find were interesting: articles relating to library science were not often cited by papers in other fields and methods of research were generally still based on questionnaires, rather than more quantitative methods. It is possible that the relative youth of the field is a reason for these results, as librarians were not always concerned with the concept of information behavior. I also believe that that concept itself might be why there were so few scientific papers and why the papers were restrained to a few fields. The manner of how people search or the idea that someone's question might be just a part of a bigger information need seem to be abstract concepts.
I believe that more studies in the theories of information behaviors should be done. It remains a relevant field: with more content being made available online, it's not only librarians who need to remain focused on how people interact with all the information we have access to in this Information Age, but any company, organization, or person with a website who wants it to be findable. I agree with Dervin and Nilan, who in "Information needs and uses" argue that the field of information behavior needs to continue to define its theories and expand in new directions. They use seven criteria to establish a shift in mindset: the way we view information, the user, and the user experience; predict user behavior; our method for determining information needs; our approaches to research; and a new importance on the individual. The older methods of system-centered research and literature was unhelpful then, now it's practically irrelevant.
Since the Internet is available to such a wide spectrum of people, users can come from an array of backgrounds and situations (as Dervin calls them in "From the mind’s eye of the user: The sense-making qualitative-quantitative methodology") or ASKs (as Bates call them); information retrieval systems need to be approachable and usable by people with a variety of education, intellect, experience with IR systems, and expectations. By doing more research into the user as an individual, IR systems will be be able to adapt to better serve those who use them. The system-focused paradigm relies too heavily on stereotypes and assumptions about the users. And while demographics may seem like an appropriate method of distinction in a small library system, in a library that serves a large population, like the one I patronize in Brooklyn, the patrons can't be placed into neat groups.
To return to Duggan and Julien, I believe it's important that articles written about and for library science or information behavior should cross-reference and be cross-referenced by other fields. Users draw from a vast and complex network of experience and knowledge, and not just from their understanding of library/information science. Information behavior is not exclusive to one field since the users aren't exclusive.
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