Library and Information Science

There are some researches that try to apply the optimal foraging theory in ethology to information seeking behavior. The optimal foraging is the theory on foraging behavior of an animal and explains what range of prey type it searches and how long it stays in patches, in term of their foraging time and calorie gain. The former researches on the optimal foraging in information seeking and information retrieval measure information gain by the number of acquired documents. Those researches are inevitably limited only to the case where information gain can be measured by the number of documents and differences among documents are negligible. A method is proposed that measures information gain by user’s relative estimation. This method extends the area of application of the optimal foraging theory to information seeking behavior.