INFORMATION NAVIGATION BEHAVIOR OF GEOSCIENTISTS IN INDIAN PETROLEUM INDUSTRY

This paper presents findings of a survey of the information navigation behavior of 500 geoscientists (geologists, geophysicists, and geochemists) employed in the Indian petroleum industry in regard to the following: i) What different functions/jobs/geoscientists do and their information navigation activities at their workplaces in the petroleum industry.

iii) The information and data resources to which they refer, how frequently, and the age of the information, as analyzed from the references cited in communications made through different media. The sources covered for citation analysis include Bulletin ONGC since inception, proceedings of national and international conferences, seminars, symposia, workshops, monographs, etc., as indexed in Petroleum Abstracts, GeoRef, and other resources.

iii) How geoscientists’ communication influences the growth and structure of national and international databases.

This paper will also provide an overview of applied geo-scientific information and data resources, and will discuss the organization and management of heterogeneous information resources generated in-house or procured from outside sources. An Information navigational instrument, the Library and Information Management System of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited will be described. The paper will also assess the effectiveness of different navigational tool features in locating and retrieving pertinent resources, based on results of the survey.