Hunting and Gathering on the Information Savanna Page: 11

                                
tions to the information explosion. The bricoleur6 model designed by
Copeland, and echoing Levi-Strauss and the pragmatics of Rorty, pre-
sents a means for rescuing Information Science by turning the Kuhnian
"Are we a science?" dilemma on its head. At the same time, it forms
the basis for an expanded concept of retrieval systems, providing the
epistemological foundation, the impetus, and a means for exploration of
human search capabilities. Here we establish the basis for our conversa-
tional approach to illuminating what interesting, vexing, or enabling
concepts have been hidden in the shadows.
We look to three different arenas of nontrivial seeking in the next
chapters. Chapter 3, "It's Wise to Study the Ways of One's Adversary:
Submarine Chasing," explores the thoughts of a highly decorated Cold
War submarine hunter. Training, the role of stories, and "knowing the
ways of one's adversary" are merged with operations research concepts
from Morse and search theory concepts from Janes on browsing and
hunting. Chapter 4, "Fifty-Two Stories to an Arrest: Bounty Hunting,"
examines in depth one case report. Content analysis and discussion
with the bounty hunter lead to a multithreaded and dynamic model of
seeking, with frequent collaboration and reconfiguring. Chapter 5,
"Frameworks for an Emerging Image of Engineering Design," presents
a content analysis of the few works on epistemological foundations of
engineering design activity. Tolerant of ambiguity uncertainty, concep-
tualizing, pragmatic, and visual are some of the concepts that emerge
from the examination of engineering design as a human activity.
We move to what has been said in the literature of the field on in-
formation hunting in chapter 6, "Foraging for Relevance." The working
title for this chapter sets the stage: "Indexing, Coupling, Hunting, and
Berry Picking." It should be no surprise that there is not a great deal of
literature expressly looking at hunting and gathering behavior. Patrick
Wilson seems to be at the heart of the work explicitly looking at infor-
mation seeking in hunter and gatherer terms. In his book Two Kinds of
Power he presents a general model and a substantial statement of the
necessity for a hunting and gathering model: "We cannot eliminate the
need for hunting and picking, for we cannot anticipate all the ways in
which people will ask for the items we list in bibliographical instru-
ments."
Perhaps the most widely cited work in this area has been Marcia
Bates's "berry picking" article,7 which articulates descriptions of seek-
ing activity and speaks to means of implementation. Howard White, in
For Information Specialists (Bates, White, and Wilson, 1992), presents
taxonomies of search types and a delightful profile of seekers focused
on Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Desk Set. Brian

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Chapter 1