Open AccessProfessional e‐government seeking behavior
Author(s) -
Svarre Tanja,
Lykke Marianne
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14505001078
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , affect (linguistics) , information seeking , interpretation (philosophy) , psychology , public relations , search engine indexing , work (physics) , social psychology , political science , computer science , information retrieval , engineering , programming language , mechanical engineering , philosophy , linguistics , communication
The present paper is concerned with professional e‐government seeking behavior. With the digitalization of governments, expectations have been raised with regard to changes in the composition of employee work tasks. The purpose of our study is to determine whether these changes affect seeking behavior and if so how they change it. We focus on the status of current seeking behavior in a Danish government administration. The results showed that information needs are commonly verificative and consciously topical and that information seeking most often takes the form of mere “look‐ups.” Employees experience many search problems, such as the lack of specificity, differences in the interpretation of the topics of documents, and unwieldy and irrelevant search results. These problems can be solved by a combination of improved indexing practices and search features.