NASA/DOD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project. Paper Thirty One. TheInformation-Seeking Behavior of Engineers

摘要

Engineers are an extraordinarily diverse group of professionals, but an attributecommon to all engineers is their use of information. Engineering can be conceptualized as an information processing system that must deal with work-related uncertainty through patterns of technical communications. Throughout the process, data, information, and tacit knowledge are being acquired, produced, transferred, and utilized. The fact that these data, information, and tacit knowledge deal with hard technologies or may be physically or hardware encoded (1) should not detract from the observation that engineering is fundamentally an information processing activity. The engineer can be viewed as the center of that information processing system. According to Sayer, Engineering is a production system in which data, information, and knowledge are new materials. Whatever the purpose of the engineering effort, the engineer is an information processor who is constantly faced with the problem of effectively acquiring, using, producing, and transferring data, information, and knowledge.