Serving a Fragmented Field: Information Seeking in Higher Education

This study examines the information seeking habits and needs of scholars of higher education. Because higher education is a field which draws on many disciplinary traditions rather than a pure discipline in itself, the information needs of these scholars require diverse information seeking strategies. Phenomenological interviews with productive scholars of higher education were conducted and analyzed for this study. Ellis' (1989) common information seeking behaviors of social scientists are used as a framework to examine the behaviors of these applied social scientists in the modern information seeking environment.