Faculty Use of the World Wide Web: Modeling Information Seeking Behavior in a Digital Environment Page: 89

equivalent of Ellis' "Starting" and "Browsing" stages. Ellis (1989a, pp. 178-200) called
the "Starting" stage as the "initial search for information." He referred to the "Browsing"
stage as when a faculty member found a source or "area" that had useful information, the
faculty member began to browse the area for additional information on the topic of
interest. The "Gathering" stage in the Intemrnet Model was also similar to Ellis'
"Extracting" stage where the faculty member began to work through the source to "locate
material of interest."
Table No. 5
Internet Information Seeking Activities Model
Stage Type of Activities Parallel Stages
Gathering Fulfilling information needs through Communicating through
searching and retrieving information E-mail with colleagues and
from Intemrnet sites students and participating in
listservs
Validating Determining the reliability of retrieved
information from the Intemrnet Mentoring of students to
search for, use, and validate
Linking & Following information from the Intemrnet
Re-validating page and determining the reliability of that
site
Monitoring Keeping up-to-date on personal areas of
interest, general news topics, or on research
topics of interest
Ellis' "Chaining" stage, following the footnote trail, was similar to the "Linking"
stage in the Intemet Information Seeking Activities Model. In both models, a faculty
member uses the footnotes or embedded links to find additional information on the topic
of interest.

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