Herbert Menzel

Herbert Menzel (1921-1987) was an American sociologist.

Life

Herbert Menzel was born in 1921 in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1939. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1947 and earned a PhD in sociology there in 1959 with a thesis on "Social determinants of physicians' reactions to innovations in medical practice." He also held a master's degree from Indiana University.

Menzel taught at Carleton College, then became Research associate at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in New York. He moved to New York University in 1965 as professor of sociology. Menzel was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris 1979-1980. He died in 1987.

Contributions

Herbert Menzel was a pioneer of studies of the use of information, especially in scientific communication. An article in Wikipedia on "information needs" has this brief summary of his work:

Herbert Menzel preferred demand studies to preference studies. Requests for information or documents that were actually made by scientists in the course of their activities form the data for demand studies. Data may be in the form of records of orders placed for bibliographics, calls for books from an interlibrary loan system, or inquires addressed to an information center or service. Menzel also investigated user study and defined information seeking behaviour from three angles:

• When approached from the point of view of the scientist or technologists, these are studies of scientists' communication behaviour;
• When approached from the point of view of any communication medium, they are use studies;
• When approached from the science communication system, they are studies in the flow of information among scientists and technologists.

Publications

• "Information needs and uses in science and technology." Annual review of information science and technology 1, no. 1 (1966): 41-69. [1]
• "A new coefficient for scalogram analysis." Public Opinion Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1953): 268-280.
• "Social relations and innovation in the medical profession: The epidemiology of a new drug." With E. Katz. Public opinion quarterly 19, no. 4 (1955): 337-352.
• "The diffusion of an innovation among physicians." With J. Coleman & E. Katz. Sociometry 20, no. 4 (1957): 253-270. [2]
• "Innovation, integration, and marginality: A survey of physicians." American sociological review (1960): 704-713.
• Medical Innovations -- Diffusion Study. 1966.
• "Can science information needs be ascertained empirically." In: Communication: Concepts and perspectives Ed, by L. Thayer. International Symposium on Communication Theory and Research, 2d, Excelsior Springs, Mo., 1966. Washington, DC: Spartan Books [1967] (1967): 279-295. Also available as ERIC report ED 078477.
• Formal and informal satisfaction of the information requirements of chemists. New York : Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1970.

Further reading

• Obituary. New York Times Jan 31, 1987.
• "Information needs" Wikipedia [3]