Information Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

1. Introduction

Information and knowledge are the backbone of life and the basis of human development on which people and civilizations have been based since the beginning of human creation. That includes methods of obtaining it from observation, experimentation and linking with primitive methods to modern techniques and strategies in obtaining information, linking, developing and investing it to make decisions at various levels. The need for information was related to the need to ensure human survival and continuity in this life, from which his education needs, maintaining health, providing access to safe food, safe ways of living and other basic needs for the survival of the human species developed, and the subsequent recreational and complementary needs improved from various fields Social, economic, political and environmental life.

With the successive developments that humanity has witnessed, obtaining information has evolved and varied between traditional and digital, as is the case today. The scope of information collection, sharing and use has expanded from the societal to local, regional and global scale in record time thanks to technology and digital media. This facilitated developing information, adding to it and modifying it, and the scope of its use expanded according to the need for it from one place to another. As a result of investing this successively developing information, various aspects of life took a continuous and rapid development.

Since the search for information is a human behavior associated with human existence, survival and development, information behavior has become one of the most critical areas of information science research that seeks to understand the way people search for information and use it in various contexts of life. It should be noted that the term information behavior includes, in addition to the behaviors associated with information search and retrieval, an understanding of why individuals search for information and how to use and deal with it. Tomas D. Wilson, who first coined the term information behavior in 1981, defined information behavior in 2000 as the totality of human behavior concerning sources and channels of information. The definition here includes a reference to the diversity of sources and channels of obtaining information, as we mentioned earlier, as a result of the successive developments and the expansion of the cumulative area of ​​knowledge, sciences and experiences that have been transmitted through generations and developed and built upon until there is an information explosion and vast amounts of information are produced per second around the world.

With this tremendous amount of information and knowledge, the search for it - due to the impossibility of capturing it - is done according to the individual's need and the goal of obtaining it. It also requires high skills in the digital age to evaluate information and choose the most appropriate and reliable to avoid income in the event of information drowning or misleading information. They are phenomena associated with information due to the massive amount of information published digitally by individuals and specialized and non-specialized institutions for various purposes.

Many concepts have been associated with information behavior, including the concept of “information need,” a concept presented by Wilson through which he indicates that the need for information includes three essential elements: Why does the individual decide to search for information (here he shows the purpose or goal of the research) The purpose of the information the individual obtains, and how the retrieved information is used. The concept of information-seeking behavior focuses more on information-seeking and information retrieval behavior, and such research may improve information and retrieval systems. The search for information or information-seeking behaviors is studied extensively from several sciences, such as psychology and sociology. It involves many factors such as education levels, personal and societal factors, and many others. Information-seeking behaviors are still being studied and developed due to the different and evolving environments and the renewal of science, technologies and information sources, with which behaviors undoubtedly differ.