The role of personality in musicians' information seeking for creativity.

Introduction. This paper explores the relationship between musicians' information seeking behaviour and their personality traits within the context of musical creativity. Although previous research has addressed different sociotechnological and behavioural aspects of music information seeking, the role of personality characteristics around creative activities has been an under-researched area. Method. The research was conducted by means of a questionnaire survey administered to Greek musicians. The survey questions were developed based on theory from the domains of information behaviour (Wilson 1981) and musical creativity (Webster 2002). Different personality characteristics were measured using the Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) (Judge et al., 2003) based on self-efficacy, self-esteem, locus of control and neuroticism. the Core Self-Evaluations Scale (CSES) Analysis. The questionnaire survey provides empirical evidence of the associations between personality traits, music information seeking and musical creativity based on descriptive and inferential nonparametric statistical analysis for group differences. Results. The results indicate that information plays a significant role in different creative activities of musicians. Musicians utilised a variety of information sources but encountered important obstacles in information seeking. A significant connection was also found between musicians' personality characteristics and different types of information seeking aspects, creativity, as well as demographic differences. Conclusions. Overall, musicians' personality and in particular self-efficacy is associated with scholarly information seeking and analysis