Creative information seeking: Part II: Empirical verification

Purpose – This is part II of on-going research, the purpose being to establish a creative information-seeking model. Design/methodology/approach – Two studies were conducted to examine the subjects' creative information seeking behaviours and the extent to which they exhibited the proposed stages in creative information seeking when accomplishing a directed and an open-ended information-seeking task respectively. Findings – Findings seemed to indicate that all the subjects underwent the proposed stages although they seemed to embrace characteristics of these stages in varying degrees. Findings also showed that if subjects performed the proposed stages more iteratively or non-sequentially, then a greater amount of creativity was needed to accomplish the information-seeking task. Originality/value – The paper offers a discussion on the relationships between creativity, complexity of tasks, and levels of expertise in domain knowledge.