Marcia J. Bates

Marcia J. Bates
Residence	Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Fields	Information science
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles
Alma mater	Pomona College, University of California, Berkeley
Known for	Work on information seeking behavior, search strategy, subject access to information, and user-centered design of information systems
Notable awards	American Association for the Advancement for Science Fellow, American Society for Information Science Research Award and Award of Merit, American Society for Information Science "Best Journal of ASIS Paper of the Year Award," Frederick G. Kilgour Award

Marcia J. Bates (born 1942) is Professor VI Emerita of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. She has previously taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and was tenured at the University of Washington in 1981 before joining the faculty at UCLA. Bates has published widely on information seeking behavior, search strategy, subject access in manual and automated systems, and user-centered design of information retrieval systems. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a recipient of the American Society for Information Science Research Award, 1998, Award of Merit, 2005, and has twice received the American Society for Information Science "Best Journal of ASIS Paper of the Year Award," in 1980 and 2000. In 2001 she received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology.

She was Editor-in-Chief (Mary Niles Maack, Associate Editor) of the 7-volume, 5,742-page (print and online) Third Edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (Taylor & Francis, 2010).^[1][2] The encyclopedia addresses ten information disciplines: LIS, archival science, museum studies, knowledge management, informatics, information systems, records management, bibliography, document and genre studies, and social studies of information.

Bates has consulted for numerous organizations in her areas of expertise, including private industry, dot-coms, government, and foundations. Among these organizations are the Library of Congress, Getty Research Institute, Council on Library and Information Resources, U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (Guatemala), American Chemical Society, Litton Guidance and Control Systems, Amgen, Inc., Stone & Webster Engineering Corp., Southern California Edison, Ensemble, Inc. (San Rafael, CA), and Electric Schoolhouse (now Lightspan.com).

She received a B.A. from Pomona College (1963) and an M.L.S and Ph.D (1972) from the University of California, Berkeley. She served in the Peace Corps in Thailand in 1963-65.

Searching and Search Strategy

Bates' early work dealt with searching success and failure in library catalogs—did the user's search terms match with relevant items of interest? She initially became known for her articles on information search tactics, that is, techniques and heuristics for improving retrieval success in information systems.^[3] Before the era of the World Wide Web, librarians did skillful online database searches on behalf of library users, as the searching was difficult and required extensive training. Bates wrote several widely influential articles on important techniques for online searching within the systems in use at the time.

User-Centered Information System Design

Many of Bates' contributions have been in the area of user-centered information system design. Several of her papers have been widely cited and used, including articles on her concepts of "berrypicking," of "information search tactics," and the "cascade of interactions" in the user-system interface.^[4][5][6] Most recently, her article re-defining the nature of browsing argues for a more natural and native understanding of the behavior, an understanding that should make possible more realistic browsing interfaces for information systems.^[7]

Information Seeking Behavior and Subject Access

Bates' work in user-centered design has been based in further work she has done on information seeking behavior and subject access to information resources.^[8] In conjunction with the Getty Research Institute, and other Getty agencies, she has studied humanities information seeking online extensively, producing six articles on the work.^[9][10] In subject access, as early as 1985, she designed and argued for a "cluster thesaurus" that would bring together all the syntactic and semantic variants of a concept under each concept. Searches could then match on any term in the cluster, with the searcher able to select subsets of terms for further searching. This was also known as the "front-end system mind." ^[11]

Definition of Information

In her controversial articles on the nature of information, Bates takes an evolutionary approach to the development of human and animal information and knowledge.^[12][13] According to Bates, information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy. Information is defined as both independent of sensing beings (Information 1) as well as that pattern of organization given meaning by a living being (Information 2).

Bates defines information and several fundamental information forms for the information disciplines. She introduced to the field notions of experienced information (what one perceives and thinks about), enacted information (what one does and observes others doing), and expressed information (communicatory expressions). She further talks about "recorded information" (self-explanatory) and "embedded information." The latter refers to information structures in the external environments that are created by humans and animals.

Her definition marks a stark change from the long held definition of information in communication theory. The communication model sees information as the flow and exchange of a message, originating from one speaker, mind, or source and received by another. According to Ronald Day, "Implicit in this standard model of information are such notions as the intentionality of the speaker, the self-evident 'presence' of that intention in his or her words, a set of hearers or users who receive the information and who demonstrate the correctness of that reception in action or use, and the freedom of choice in regards to the speaker's ability to say one thing rather than another, as well as even the receivers freedom of choice to receive one message rather than another in the marketplace of ideas."^[14]

Bates claims (drawing on S. Goonatilake) that there are three fundamental channels of information: genetic, neural-cultural, and exosomatic.^[15] She also adds a fourth channel, Residue, which carries "trace information," which is degrading from represented back to natural information. This is the type of greatest interest to archeologists and museologists.

Her view of information has been discussed by Hjørland.^[16] responded to by Bates ^[17] and rejoinded by Hjørland.^[18]

The Information Disciplines

In response to the rapid transformations in libraries and in information science, Bates has also written on the nature of the information disciplines, the best known article being "The invisible substrate of information science." ^[19] The design of the encyclopedia she and Maack edited also reflects her arguments about the nature of the information disciplines.^[20]

Other

Marcia Bates has also written on bibliography and on bibliometrics. Her current work continues her interest in the nature of the information disciplines.

External links

• Bates' Faculty Website
• UCLA Department of Information Studies
• Works by or about Marcia J. Bates in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Notes

1. ^ http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/pdf/Introduction.pdf
2. ^ http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/pdf/topical-toc.pdf
3. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1979). Information Search Tactics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 30(4): 205-214.
4. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1989). The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface. Online Review 13(5): 407-424
5. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1990). Where Should the Person Stop and the Information Search Interface Start? Information Processing & Management 26: 575-591.
6. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2002). The Cascade of Interactions in the Digital Library Interface. Information Processing and Management 38:381-400.
7. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2007). What is browsing—really? A model drawing from behavioural science research Information Research, 12(4) paper 330. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/paper330.html]
8. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2002). Toward an Integrated Model of Information Seeking and Searching. (Keynote Address, Fourth international Conference on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts, Lisbon, Portugal, September 11, 2002.) New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 3: 1-15.
9. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1996). The Getty End-User Online Searching Project in the Humanities: Report No. 6: Overview and Conclusions. College & Research Libraries 57(6): 514-523.
10. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1994). The Design of Databases and Other Information Resources for Humanities Scholars: The Getty Online Searching Project Report No. 4." Online & CDROM Review 18(6):331-340
11. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1986). Subject Access in Online Catalogs: A Design Model. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 37(6): 357-376.
12. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2005). Information and Knowledge: An Evolutionary Framework for Information Science. Information Research, 10 (4) paper 239, 2005 [available at http://InformationR.net/ir/10-4/paper239.html ]
13. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2006). Fundamental Forms of Information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(8):1033-1045
14. ^ Day, Ronald E. (2001). The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, p. 38.
15. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2006). Fundamental Forms of Information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(8):1044
16. ^ Hjørland, Birger (2007). Information: Objective or subjective/situational? Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(10), 1448-1456,
17. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2008). Hjørland's Critique of Bates' Work on Defining Information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(5): 842-844.
18. ^ Hjørland, B. (2009). The controversy over the concept of "information". A rejoinder to Professor Bates. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(3), p. 643.
19. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (1999). The Invisible Substrate of Information Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50(12): 1043-1050.
20. ^ Bates, Marcia J. (2007). Defining the information disciplines in encyclopedia development. Information Research, 12(4) paper colis29. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis29.html]

Persondata
Name	Bates, Marcia J.
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Date of birth	1942
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