Page 176 - 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 175

information behavior research community, Sense-Making theory is a typical constructivism-based
theoretical frame. Sense-Making theory was developed by American scholars Brenda Dervin and
her colleagues. From the perspective of Sense-Making theory, information sources existing outside
of information agent will make sense only when they are placed in the specific and personal
context and used for individual sense making. Thus, the utility of information usage depends on
the process of how users solve their problems through the usage of information. The process of
information exchange occurs in the personal information context of information user and restricted
by personal knowledge, experiences, judgments, physical conditions, psychological states, time
and spaces (Dervin, 1989). Sense-Making theory not only concerns the process of information
retrieval and usage, but also the factors which may affect this process. For Sense-Making theory,
when the constructive process is broken, information poverty occurred. For this reason, the theory
provides a constructivism perspective for information divide and information poverty research
(Liu, 2012).
Savolainen, who developed the Information Source Horizon theory, did not elucidate the
relationship between Sense-Making theory and Information Source Horizon. But when he made
a further discussion on the information source preferences criteria, he actually shared the similar
perspective with Sense-Making theory. The evidence issued by our research revealed how the
process of sense making affected the information divide through affecting the information
source horizon of information agents. For example, in rural China, Nongke Station, a farmer’s
service station established by local government, is a very important information source for those
agricultural related information seeker, especially for those who suffer in plant disease and insect
pests. Therefore, we expect that all farmers may put Nongke Station in high priority. But to our
surprise, many farmers exclude Nongke Station out of their information source horizon (they did
not contact with Nongke Station at all). The reason is not the physical existing of information
sources, but rather the shortage of experiences and knowledge. For instance, limited knowledge
and experiences of the utility of Nongke Station tend to make some farmers classify Nonge Station
into the useless information sources and exclude it out of their information source horizon. It
is thus clear that sense-making process affected the broadness of farmers’ information source
horizon at least in two ways: firstly, farmers filter information sources surrounding him/her by a
classification process of constructing them into useful or useless information sources. Secondly,
the richness of farmers’ information world depends on the completeness of the process of sense-
making smoothly and remedy the knowledge gap to gain useful information from information
sources.

4.3 Information Source Horizon is rooted in the context of information agents

Scholars in the field of information behavior pay much attention to the context factors in recent