Page 105 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Information Sources and Services

Notes reasonable time and cost. Here we shall try to examine all these elements involved in information
retrieval. The nature or characteristics of a user could be varied. The user could be a layman who
needs information to satisfy his curiosity. A student who needs more details than provided by
the text book, a technical worker who needs the information to perform a certain task, a research
worker embarking on a new area of research, a project manager contemplating a new product
line, or an administrator who has to give his decision on a new project report or formulate a new
strategy. Obviously the nature of information, extent of information and depth of information
required by each of them are different. Besides the urgency for getting the information may also
vary, not only for the different types of users, but for the same type of user under different
circumstances. While some of the needs of most of the users could be satisfied by the routine
reference service provided by a good library, needs of some others specially research workers
and project managers can be satisfied only by extensive literature search entailing all the resources
of a modem information centre and ingenuity of the information scientists.

Reference Service vs. Literature Search

Reference service, according to the A.L.A. Glossary of Library Terms is “that phase of library
work which is directly concerned with assistance to readers in securing information and in
using the resources of the library in study and research”. Usually a reference service responds to
a specific piece of information – about a person, about a place or event, a method, procedure,
formula etc. The nature of information sought in such a situation is very specific and quite often
the answer could be found from the conventional reference tools, like dictionaries, encyclopaedias,
manuals, handbooks, gazetteers, directories, yearbooks, etc.
Literature search, on the other hand, can be equated to “long range reference service”, where the
search has to be more exhaustive – both in depth and extent. The range and complexity of
reference sources to be consulted are wider and generally more than one source has to be
consulted to adequately carryout a literature search. Besides bibliographies, secondary sources
like abstracting and indexing services, reviewing periodicals are the main sources of information.
The demand for this service has been growing with the growth of scientific and technical literature
which has assumed frightening proportion in the post-Second World War era.

Need for Literature Search

As indicated earlier, the scientific and technical literature has been growing exponentially,
while the amount of time that any user has for reading this literature remains more or less the
same. Surely and certainly no research worker can keep a track of the latest developments in his
field unaided. The advantage of overabundance of information is hampered by the inadequacy
of facilities for handling, disseminating and retrieving this vast amount of documented
knowledge. Literature search is the means to bridge this gap between the vast store of documented
information and its potential user. The main function of an information service is to bring
documents of data to the attention of the user community through searches of the literature
conducted generally on demand to meet the problem solving or decision-making needs of the
member.

Ways of Conducting Literature Search

There are broadly two ways of literature searching that is in vogue these days. We shall briefly
touch upon these two aspects. These ways are:
1. Manual Searching: This involves searching manually paper documents of references sources
that could be primary, secondary or tertiary as discussed earlier. The identification of
references from these sources is then compiled, organized and passed on to the concern

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