Looking to the Future While Learning from the Past: Information Seeking in the Visual Arts

At the core of this study is the perception that overall, scholars in the visual arts have unique requirements in their information-seeking behaviors and processes and that there has been an extraordinary deficiency and lack of progress in understanding and addressing their needs. A self-administered questionnaire, adapted from previous studies, was used to query subsets of visual arts humanities scholars from three academic institutions on demographic information, their use of information resources, and their approaches to locating information. Although former studies raised important questions about the idiosyncratic information-seeking behaviors of visual arts humanities scholars and their methodologies, a current understanding of the information-seeking behaviors and processes of the domain is necessary to document persistent and distinctive information requirements within the population, to note changes over time, and to determine the extent to which technology has impacted the information-seeking experience within the domain.