The Effectiveness of Browsing

SEVERAL PREVIOUS STUDIES have attempted to determine the comparative importance of the different sources employed by scientists in locating information. Voigt reviewed some of these studies and found considerable agreement in the ranking of the various sources.1 Browsing was found to be the method most often used to learn about printed information sources. The second most important method was the recommendations of colleagues. Ot4er sources, listed in order of their importance, were: the scientist's own memory, citations found in books and periodicals, personal indexes, and library catalogs. The use studies reviewed by Voigt compared the different methods of locating information from a quantitative point of view. That is, the various studies ranked the methods according to how often they were used or how much information they produced. Except for a few indexing studies, such as the Cranfield investigations, which have included library card catalogs, very little research is available about the quality of the information produced by each of the methods. Therefore, little is known about the value or usefulness of information discovered in different ways in libraries. One study which briefly touched on the usefulness of books and serials found through browsing was made by Fussier and Simon.2 They found that