Forsythe D E
Medical Anthropology Program, University of California, San Francisco 94143-0850, USA.
Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1998 Jul;86(3):402-9.
Designing information resources that actually meet the information needs of individuals requires detailed knowledge of these needs. This poses a challenge for developers. Because the meaning of particular terms can vary by field, professional knowledge differs to some extent in different disciplines, and the questions that people ask assume a certain amount of unarticulated background knowledge, understanding the information needs of life scientists is not a trivial undertaking. One source of help in meeting this challenge is ethnography, a set of research methods and an associated conceptual stance developed and used by anthropologists for investigating uncontrolled real-world settings. Drawing on the author's experience in using ethnographic techniques to study clinicians' information needs, this paper describes why such research is necessary, why it requires particular research methods, what an ethnographic perspective has added to the study of information needs, and what this broader approach has revealed about the types of information sought by clinicians in the course of their daily practice.
设计真正满足个人信息需求的信息资源需要对这些需求有详细的了解。这给开发者带来了挑战。由于特定术语的含义可能因领域而异，不同学科的专业知识在一定程度上有所不同，而且人们提出的问题假定了一定数量未阐明的背景知识，因此理解生命科学家的信息需求并非易事。应对这一挑战的一个帮助来源是人种学，它是人类学家为研究不受控制的现实世界环境而开发和使用的一套研究方法及相关概念立场。本文借鉴作者运用人种学技术研究临床医生信息需求的经验，阐述了此类研究为何必要、为何需要特定的研究方法、人种学视角给信息需求研究带来了什么，以及这种更广泛的方法揭示了临床医生在日常实践中寻求的信息类型。
