Information seeking behaviour of historians in Malaysia / Farizah Ideris

This study is conducted to examine the behavioural pattern of historians in informationseeking and investigate the effect of the theory of change management on information seeking behaviour among Malaysian historians. There have been few studies on the pattern of information seeking behaviour among historians as the academician conduct their historical research. Thus, this study aims to understand a general pattern of information-seeking behaviour of historians in the Malaysian environment in terms of the activities of the process, the strategies they used, and the barriers they encountered when looking for information sources. The study was conducted in two phases by adopting a single case study with an embedded design. The first phase involved an exploratory study in acquiring a general overview from the population sample, consisting of Malaysian lecturers who taught the history subject at the Malaysian public universities and Malaysian General Studies from the Institute of Teachers Education Malaysia. In total, there were 155 respondents involved in this phase. The findings provide a general understanding of the respondents' demographic background and information-seeking behaviour patterns. The findings highlighted that the advent of digitization had increased the ease of historical research. However, historians still prefer printed sources over digital format. In the second phase, a qualitative semi-structured interview was conducted to clarify research topics on the effect of the individual changes approaches in terms of behavioural, cognitive, psychodynamic and humanistic psychology on historians' information seeking. The criteria outlined in the selection were expertise in history, years of experience conducting historical research, and experience producing historical writings. Five subjects were selected to confirm the information seeking behaviour among Malaysian historians and the proposed framework of information seeking behaviour for Malaysian historians. The conclusions drawn from the study would propose a model that could be used as the basis for building a framework that describes the behaviour of information seeking of historians providing information needs for information professionals. Future studies would be interesting if the findings would contribute significantly to understanding the theoretical, practical aspects and information needs of Malaysian academician information seeking behaviour that may relate to archival context and other various fields.