Page 172 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Wenjie ZHOU, Hui YAN & Shenglong HAN / Exploring information divide based on a theoretical view of information source horizon 171

From the theoretical perspective of Information Source Horizon, lack of organized
information sources causes shortage of awareness to access the valuable information resources
from libraries, and thus, locates these people to the disadvantaged side of information divide.
For example, as we mentioned above, interviewee L was applying for an environment friendly
planting project. Obviously, this project needed to be supported by professional knowledge.
Although he used many different kinds of information sources, he had never used any
organized information sources. If we compare this farmer’s information seeking behavior to
the professional researchers, we can find that while a professional researcher make arguments
for his research program, he/she will rely on the large number of organized information
sources, and then he/she may demonstrate and perform his program based on the information
provided by organized information sources. But for the interviewee L, this extremely
important information sources are absent. It is clear that even interviewer L is information rich
compared with his counterpart, but compared with a professional researcher, the absence of
organized information sources produce him information poverty relatively.
Generally speaking, due to the advantages of organizational information sources on
information provide and information services, those people who are lacking of this kind of
information source are more likely to fall into the situation of information poverty. For us,
this phenomenon is not only related to the physical existing of organizational information
sources, but also because organizational information sources has addicted a lot of human
being’s reorganizational endeavor (for example, the information resources under a carefully
professional arrangement process), so users may maximum their acquirement of information
from a minimum endeavor through accessing this kind of information sources. For this reason,
lacking of organizational information sources among information source horizon will make
those information rich people (such as interviewee L) in a specific group (such as farms)
remain poor in other groups (such as professional research group) relatively.

3.3 Relationship between demographic characteristic of interviewer and their
information resources

In the existing information divide related research, demographic characteristics usually
were selected as very important variables to measure information divide. Taking digital
divide research as example, gender and age (Dimaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004),
occupation (Losh, 2004; McLaren & Zappala, 2002), income (Ebo, 1998), educational level
(Cornfield, Rainie, & Horrigan, 2003) were proved to be one of the causes of digital divide.
Our study followed the ways performed in the Information Source Horizon and related
studies to ask the interviewees to nominate their information sources. Thus, we measured the
broadness of the information source horizon through the perspective of information source