Dr. Thomas D. Wilson is a researcher in information science and has been contributing to the field since 1961, when he received his Fellowship from the British Library Association.
He then worked as a corporate librarian for the Nuclear Research Centre of C. A. Parsons, at which time he became interested in the use of new technology in information science.
More recently, Dr. Wilson looked at information seeking behaviour for the British Library Research and Innovation Centre.
Wilson's first model came from a presentation at the University of Maryland in 1971 when "an attempt was made to map the processes involved in what was known at the time as "user need research".
Published in 1981, Wilson's first model outlined the factors leading to information seeking, and the barriers inhibiting action.
[10] It stated that information-seeking was prompted by an individual's physiological, cognitive, or affective needs, which have their roots in personal factors, role demands, or environmental context.
[12] Wilson later built upon his original model in order to understand the personal circumstance, social role, and environmental context in which an information need is created.
[10] This new model, altered in 1994 incorporated Ellis' stages of information-seeking: starting, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, extracting, verifying and ending.
This model incorporated several new elements that helped to demonstrate the stages experienced by the 'person in context', or searcher, when looking for information.
In 1999, Wilson developed a nested model that brought together different areas of research in the study of information behavior.
Through numerous qualitative studies, "we now have many in depth investigations into the information seeking behavior of small samples of people".
He is a member of the group at the Swedish School which is participating in the SHAMAN project on long-term digital preservation,[18] funded by the European Union.