Libraries reaching out with health information to vulnerable populations: guidance from research on information seeking and use.

OBJECTIVE: Two branches of applied social science have devoted substantial attention to researching information seeking and use. One branch is the field of communication, with its emphasis on the design of messages to effectively transmit expert information. The second is the field of library and information science, with its emphasis on meeting user needs. This paper is an overview and comparison of what is known about information seeking and use based on these two bodies of research, particularly as it applies to serving the needs of racial and ethnic minorities. DATA SOURCE: This paper is informed by three in-depth literature reviews of the two fields and of the difficulties of bringing findings from disparate fields to bear on the same phenomena.
CONCLUSIONS: Twenty-five broad brushstroke propositions are extracted in a way that allows both commonalities and contradictions to be informative, particularly as they relate to how the flexibilities offered by electronic technologies may allow experts to serve user needs more effectively and efficiently. Remarkably, while both fields have approached their studies from separate viewpoints without much overlap, both have struggled with the baggage imposed on their research by information-as-transmission assumptions and both have moved toward approaches that focus on information-as-communication.