Way, way-way-back when I was in library school a century or more ago, I remember active discussions of a government study documenting that the preferred-and by far the most used-method for gathering information by researchers was personal contact. The documentation was used to justify a lot of conference junkets, I imagine, but the dominance of this person-to-person information-seeking must have impressed our professors sufficiently to become a warning of the uphill battle we would have in our careers as information professionals. Whatever the reason, the notion that researchers would cling to personal contact as a dominant choice in gathering information has stuck with me throughout a multiple-decade career.
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