An Empirical Investigation on Illustrators' Image Information Needs

Slides used for presentation at the Second Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts &  Humanities (May 18, 2016). http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGAH/2016/01/15/2016-symposium/ The Symposium was sponsored by the Special Interest Groups for Arts and Humanities (SIG AH) and Visualization, Images, and Sound (SIG VIS) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

Symposium presentations can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2v-vQy9W5DeXsuC5-l-T65WgFrPFKNDk

Technological advances in multimedia and the rapid growth of the Web have significantly improved people’s access to visual information. Currently, image information exists in various forms and types, and the strategies for retrieving images as well as sources for images vary considerably. Although the number of studies on image retrieval has increased, the majority of studies focus on technical aspects regarding image retrieval rather than users.

The objective of this study is to identify the image information needs of illustrators who highly depend on image information and who create images themselves. This research aims to contribute to the development of image retrieval systems and services by improving our understanding of the image information needs of image professionals. 140 survey responses were collected from three representative online communities for illustrators. The follow-up semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to assist in understanding the survey results. Our findings suggest that illustrators primarily needed to obtain knowledge from images rather than to be inspired, which is slightly different from previous studies on the image information needs of artists. The critical factors influencing image selection for illustrators were topicality and visual elements.