3. The Information Access Process A study of business analysts [oday93] found three main kinds of information seeking tasks: monitoring a well known topic over time (such as researching competitors' activities each quarter), following a plan or stereotyped series of searches to achieve a particular goal (such as keeping up to date on good business practices), and exploring a topic in an undirected fashion (as when getting to know an unfamiliar industry). Although the goals differ, there is a common core revolving around the information seeking component, which is our focus here.
