A Longitudinal Survey of the Information Seeking and Use Habits of Some Engineers

From 1978 to 1990 the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan offered «Technical Communications 490: Information Resources for Engineers» to seniors working on research projects. A follow-up study was conducted in 1993 to assess the impact of this course. Questionnaires were sent to 60 students who had taken the class and 60 students with similar characteristics who had not; the return rate for both groups was 50 percent. Although both groups of former students were very similar in their use of information resources on the job, those who had taken the Technical Communications course identified more specific resources available to them. They also rated formal sources of information, such as college and public libraries, more highly than did the respondents who had not taken the class, and spent an average of ten hours more per month searching for information and reading information. These data lead us to conclude that there is a relationship between the former students' use of information resources and their having taken Technical Communications 490. This study also revealed that many engineers have access to the tools needed for electronic information retrieval, and that while few receive formal instruction in their use, there is widespread interest in learning more