User Education: The Next Major Thrust in Information Science?.

THE PROBLEMS of information retrieval, both for retrospective search and current awareness purposes, are becoming more acute as knowledge increases in extension and intension, as the number of practicing scientists and technologists multiplies, and as the published literature grows in volume. These problems are now widely recognized in all segments of the scientific and technical community: the universities, government, and private industry. To help alleviate these problems, millions of dollars have been spent by the federal government in research on information retrieval -and in the design and operation of information centers and services. It is extremely unfortunate, therefore, that, as a number of recent studies have convincingly demonstrated, large segments of the scientific and technical community do not make use of national information services and, indeed, are largely unaware of the existence of these resources.1* 2> 3 This is true not only of on-demand services such as retrospective search, but also of widely-available published bibliographic products. Earlier studies (e.g., by Martyn4) have revealed that librarians and other information specialists are consulted comparatively little by research scientists in the course of their information gathering. Some scientists and technologists, while aware of the existence of information services, do not use them because of misconceptions relating to their