What Information Do You Give and Receive—and Why?

To complete this information use analysis, you need to look at two other important factors:1) why you give information to a specific organization or person, and 2) what information you give them.

HEALTHLINK 2000 considers its target population and its funding sources to be the two most important groups to which it gives information. The two most valuable places from which it receives information are experts in the field and libraries.

In the following Information Use Analysis, HEALTHLINK 2000 analyzed its information giving to its target population and its information retrieval from experts in the health education field. Ideally, HEALTHLINK 2000 should fill out similar sheets for the other primary audiences that it identified on the two Information Sharing worksheets.

There are clearly more factors involved in using information than simply who, what, and why—everything enters into the total picture, from how you give or receive information (over the telephone? in publications? by searching databases?) to when you give or receive information (every day? once a year?). But the who, what, and why are the basic questions that must be answered to determine appropriate directions for using the Internet. The Internet itself will be one way that you change the "how" in exchanging information.

Exercise 3: Information Use Analysis

Fill out the Information Use Analysis worksheets for each of your organization's major targets and sources of information to get as complete an analysis as possible. Another way to look at the question "Why is the information needed?" is to think of what the information will be used for. What is the end result that the information will help you accomplish?



post by santan...29th...july......