Study of Information Needs in the Historical Retrospect

Abstract

The article presents an overview of the history of study of reading and information needs in Russia based on the analysis of publications in the professional press. The author highlights the main stages of development in this research area and notes the achievements of librarians who have made the greatest scientific contribution to the development of theory of information needs. The author shows that even before the emergence of the term (in the mid-twentieth century), the phenomenon of information needs was studied indirectly — through the analysis of reader’s interests and preferences. The article focuses on the formation and development of the methodology of studying information needs, considers the practice of using various research methods, including special ones: quantitative, qualitative, complex and computer. The author notes the role of the founder of bibliopsychology Nikolai A. Rubakin, who for the first time compared the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of reading with the social status of reader, and the significant contribution to the development of theory of information needs made by S.D. Kogotkov, who described the mechanisms and stages of their formation based on the activity approach. The article highlights the large-scale projects for studying reading of various social groups, implemented in the 1960s and 1980s. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the interest to the problem of information needs and its various aspects raised again. Research issues expanded mainly due to the increase in the number of works on the transformation of information needs in the electronic environment, professional reading, including specialists in the library sphere. The article shows the process of identifying the problems of information needs in the independent scientific direction of library science. It is concluded that despite the intensive research in recent decades, the scientific potential of the problem of information needs is far from exhausted, due to the complexity of the phenomenon being studied. The author believes that the priority task of library science in the near future should be research aimed at studying the peculiarities of the formation of professional information needs of specialists with the emphasis on the subjective component and involvement of modern methodological tools.