Thomas D. Wilson (born 18 January 1935) is a British researcher in information science and his research has focused on information management and information seeking behaviour. He has been contributing to the field since 1961, which was when he received his Fellowship from the British Library Association. He is the founder of the online journal for the information sciences, Information Research. Dr. Wilson has created and revised a model of information behavior as well as the Nested Model. He has won a number of prestigious awards, the two most recent being the Award of Merit Association for Information Science and Technology in 2017 and the Jason Farradane Award in 2020. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sheffield Information School and University of Borås, Sweden.
Biography Thomas Daniel Wilson was born in 1935 at Shincliffe Station in County Durham, England. He left school at age 16 to work as a library assistant in Durham County Library. Following national service in the Royal Air Force he returned to Durham County Library and took the examinations of the Library Association to qualify as a professional librarian. He then moved to being head of a small academic library. He then worked as a corporate librarian for the Nuclear Research Centre of C. A. Parsons, at which time he became interested in the use of new technology in information science. After completing his Fellowship of the Library Association he began his academic career in 1961, with a move to the library school of the Municipal College of Commerce, now Northumbria University. He subsequently obtained an external degree of London University by independent study BSc degree in economics and sociology, and a doctorate in organization theory. He is now Professor Emeritus at the Information School, University of Sheffield, and has been Visiting Professor at Leeds University Business School, and Professor Catedratico Convidado in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto. He has also been Senior Professor at the University of Borås, Sweden, and is now Professor Emeritus of that University.
Research history In the area of information behaviour (a term he invented to cover all activities associated with seeking, acquiring, using and sharing information) Dr. Wilson has focused largely in analyzing how individuals and groups gather and communicate information.
INISS Project Dr. Wilson's best-known study on information seeking behaviour was the INISS project, conducted from 1980 to 1985. The aim of the project was to increase the efficiency of Social Services workers in the management of information. In addition to the traditional methods of surveys and interviews with those seeking the information, Dr. Wilson and his team also observed social workers and their managers in their day-to-day tasks, to see what techniques were actually used to find, use and communicate information. He observed that, in the environment of a Social Services office, the majority of information (60%) was oral, with a further 10% being notes taken on oral communication. That, combined with lack of training in using the other information sources available, had led to a lack of organized information being used at Social Services offices. He recommended the establishment of a central library for Social Services information, along with training staff to access that information, as well as more communication within each office on information needs.
Uncertainty in Information Seeking More recently, Dr. Wilson looked at information seeking behaviour for the British Library Research and Innovation Centre. The resulting paper, "Uncertainty in Information Seeking," identified that information seeking is based on a series of uncertainty resolutions which lead to a problem solution. There are four steps in the process, problem identification, problem definition, problem resolution, and solution statement. At each step of the process, more information must be gathered in order to resolve the uncertainty of that step. Also, the research established that by providing information seekers with a pattern to follow (such as the four step uncertainty resolution pattern), the accuracy and volume of information they acquired was increased.
Activity theory Recently, Dr. Wilson has been an advocate for the adoption of activity theory in the area of information behaviour and in information systems research. Earlier activity theory diagrams by Bedny and Engerström have been combined and edited by Dr. Wilson to better represent the flow of information. A new diagram was created, a process model of activity, with Motivation and Goal and how they prepare the information environment for activity. He stresses that activity theory is not predictive, but rather a framework attempting to describe human behaviour.
Information management Throughout his research career, Dr. Wilson has also been active in the field of information management and was the founder and first editor of the International Journal of Information Management. His research in this area included early studies on business use of the World Wide Web, the relationship of information systems and business performance and the application of mobile information systems in policing.
Wilson's model of information behavior Wilson's model of information seeking behaviour was born out of a need to focus the field of information and library science on human use of information, rather than the use of sources. Previous studies undertaken in the field were primarily concerned with systems, specifically, how an individual uses a system. Very little had been written that examined an individual's information needs, or how information seeking behaviour related to other task-oriented behaviours. Wilson's first model came from a presentation at the University of Maryland in 1971 when "an attempt was made to map the processes involved in what was known at the time as "user need research".
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