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164 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

were poor in information access due to the alienation from outside information sources (Chatman
& Pendleton, 1995). Some others, such as so-called digital divide scholars, regard access to the
Internet as a very important standard to divide the information rich or poor (OECD/DSTI, 2011;
U.S.Department of Commerce, 2014). Others tried to interpret the information divide through the
perspective of social capital and insisted that the position of people in the social networks (e.g.,
the structure hole) and network attributes (For example, the size of information communication
networks) caused information divide (Yan, Zhou, & Han, 2013).
Although the close relationship between information sources and information divide was
confirmed by various researches. However, scholars also found that even among those people lived
in a similar information environment, the polarization between the information rich and poor were
still obvious. This means that information divide cannot be interpreted merely by the perspective
of social structure (Yu, 2013). In other words, even the number and quality of information sources
influence information agents’ information richness or poverty, a comprehensive understanding of
various factors related to the selection of information sources needs to be covered.
Obviously, aiming to understand information divide comprehensively, we should not only focus
on number and quality of physical information sources, but also pay attention to various subjective
factors such as information source preference. Based on the Information Source Horizon
theory proposed by Savolainen, our study expects to explore how the subjective factors and
organizational information resources affect the information divide through a field investigation.
Besides, this study aims to make a comparative analysis of different groups of people who are
varied on the demographics to make sense of the differentiation of information richness among
these groups.

1 Theoretical background

Information Source Horizon theory, proposed by Savolainen (2007), is a theoretical model which
aims to analyze the scope and preference of the information sources selection by information agent.
This model takes The Regions of Relevance, proposed by Schutz (1964), and Information Horizon,
proposed by Sonnenwald (1999, 2001), as theoretical and methodological basis. Schutz found that
based on the interest at hand, people tend to structure their everyday-life-world and knowledge of
it into various regions of decreasing relevance. The major regions of relevance are differentiated
as follows: 1) The world within our reach represents a specific part of the life–world that is
directly at hand and where everyday action primarily takes place. 2) The world within potential
reach—everyday-life-world also encompasses areas that are not directly at hand or that cannot be
mastered, but that may be accessed if needed. 3) Relatively irrelevant regions—these are areas that
for the time being have no connections with his/her immediate interests. 4) Absolutely irrelevant
regions—these are areas of life-world that have no relevance whatsoever from the viewpoint of
the actor because he or she cannot in practice influence things or processes to be found in this