A significant portion of the clientele of the university libraries is made up of the academic (teaching)
staff. Therefore, these libraries are responsible for systematically understanding the information
requirements and usage patterns of those academics, in order to better serve them. Hence, a
theoretical model developed exclusively for these academics becomes crucial. Therefore, this study
evaluated various models on the information seeking behaviour of diverse user groups with the aim of
constructing a model to study the information seeking behaviour of the academics. This qualitative
analysis involved reviews of both theoretical literature of six influential information seeking models,
and empirical literature within various disciplines. Out of an in-depth evaluation, the Leckie model
(1996) for professionals was adopted, where work roles and tasks, information needs, resources used
and level of awareness of information were identified to be the key factors influencing the
information seeking behaviour of academics. Further, two additional factors identified via empirical
researches were appropriately placed into this model: those are personal factors and information
searching strategies. This study also redefined these factors by incorporating suitable variables, and
proposed that Factor Analysis is used to understand the contribution of each factor towards the
information seeking behaviour of academics. It also keeps provisions for future researchers to
customize the above factors to suit different disciplines/field of study or countries. Hence, this model
can be used by the university librarians or other researchers to methodologically study the information
needs and the seeking patterns of the faculties.