[1] She was well known for her ethnographic approaches in researching information seeking behaviors among understudied or minority groups (poor people, the elderly, retired women, female inmates, and janitors).

[2] After observing inmates both during and outside of their interactions with the prison's professional employees,[3] Chatman theorizes that the women live "in the round," that is, "within an acceptable degree of approximation and imprecision.

Inmates form a "small world," a closed community where private opinion yields to a shared reality its accompanying information-seeking behavior.

Prisoners "are not part of the world [...] being defined by outsiders"[5] and because inmates do not need additional information to participate fully in their own reality, they do not seek it out.

[7] She was teaching at the School of Information Studies at Florida State University at the time of her death on January 15, 2002, at the age of 59.