Exploratory analysis of documentary failure from information scientists in France

Abstract

This communication aims at examining the occurrence of what we would call « échec documentaire » from information scientists (i.e librarians and documentalists) in their practice of informing and answering, in France. To this date, very few efforts were made in order to document in a systematic way the various types of causes of failure and to study the different factors clarifying the failures and errors made by information scientists in a moment of information exchange between users and professionals. From an analysis based on sixty face to face interviews with information scientists, we propose to characterize « l’échec documentaire » and to establish a selective panorama of the different causes of failure.