Measures of the usefulness of written technical information to chemical researchers

The effective transfer of technology involves more than just distributing paper; it demands that useful documents be disseminated with a minimum of useless ones. For 1 month, 10 researchers recorded a sample of the written technical information items that they received; 4 months later they were interviewed to determine which of these items had proved useful, and in what ways. The results indicate that (1) a researcher will call an item “useful” even if it does not cause him to take some action, but only has some significance for him; (2) the more the source of an item knows about the needs of the researcher or the more the researcher knows about an item he seeks, the more likely it is that the researcher will find the item useful; (3) no strong relationships were found between certain readily observable, physical arrangements and information behavior; and (4) an item may prove useful, not because of the information objectively contained in that item, but because the item causes a cognitive restructuring of the researcher's mind or a “free association.” Other studies that restrict their measures of information usefulness to externally observable behavior or that do not carefully define usefulness may not be validly representing usefulness to the researcher.