Information practices

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to historicise research conducted in the fields of Information Seeking and Learning and Information Literacy and thereby begin to outline a description of the history of information in the context of Swedish compulsory education. Design/methodology/approach Document work and documentary practices are used as alternatives to concepts such as information seeking or information behaviour. Four empirical examples of document work – more specifically informational reading – recorded in Swedish primary classrooms in the 1960s are presented. Findings In the recordings, the reading style students use is similar to informational reading in contemporary educational settings: it is fragmentary, facts-oriented, and procedure-oriented. The practice of finding correct answers, rather than analysing and discussing the contents of a text seems to continue from lessons organised around print textbooks in the 1960s to the inquiry-based and digital teaching of toda...

Scholarship on LGBTQ rights in library and information science remains lamentably underdeveloped. This research excavates the hidden history of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation between 1971 and 1986. Despite rampant legal and extralegal discrimination, the TF’s members and their allies refused to remain invisible, second-class citizens; they embraced voluntary, grassroots, democratic action.
This research develops the concept of communities of protest information practices (PIPs). It adumbrates a framework comprising four PIPs that distinguished the TF’s work: performative, communal, constructive, and corrective. These practices constituted vital ontological and epistemological interventions in heteronormative librarianship. This research provides a robust conceptual framework to examine not only LGBTQ people, but also other marginalized groups’ protest work.

What are the information practices of teen content creators? In the United States over two thirds of teens have participated in creating and sharing content in online communities that are developed for the purpose of allowing users to be producers of content. This study investigates how teens participating in digital participatory communities find and use information as well as how they experience the information. From this investigation emerged a model of their information practices while creating and sharing content such as film-making, visual art work, story telling, music, programming, and web site design in digital participatory communities. The research uses grounded theory methodology in a social constructionist framework to investigate the research problem: what are the information practices of teen content creators? Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and observation of teen’s digital communities. Analysis occurred concurrently with data collection, and the...

The International Journal of Information Science & Techniques (IJIST) focuses on information systems science and technology coercing multitude applications of information systems in business administration, social science, biosciences, and humanities education, library sciences management, depiction of data and structural illustration, big data analytics, information economics in real engineering and scientific problems.

This journal provides a forum that impacts the development of engineering, education, technology management, information theories and application validation. It also acts as a path to exchange novel and innovative ideas about Information systems science and technology.

This paper offers an alternative approach to the study of information and religion by exploring information seeking practices in the context of religious conversion. Based on a search for peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings in the major library and information science (LIS), religious studies, anthropology, and sociology databases, this paper includes what Marcia J. Bates has called a “rigorous systematic bibliography” (1976). I identify ways in which the concept of information seeking has been presented in the existing literature on religious conversion.

No período de 2001 a 2004, foi feita uma pesquisa entre escoteiros da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte – RMBH, a fim de analisar suas práticas informacionais, em particular as que utilizavam como canal de comunicação a Internet. Assim, apresenta-se a metodologia de pesquisa adotada na época, em
particular discutindo o uso da ferramenta de coleta de dados de grupos focais. Coloca-se em pauta a possibilidade de se realizar grupos focais online, discutindo-se as vantagens e desvantagens do uso dessa técnica via Internet.
Discute-se a abordagem metodológica, principalmente no que tange à implementação desses grupos. A pesquisa realizada aparece como pano de fundo para exemplificar a adoção da técnica.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to historicise research conducted in the fields of Information Seeking and Learning and Information Literacy and thereby begin to outline a description of the history of information in the context of Swedish compulsory education.

Design/methodology/approach. Document work and documentary practices are used as alternatives to concepts such as information seeking or information behaviour. Four empirical examples of document work – more specifically informational reading – recorded in Swedish primary classrooms in the 1960s are presented.

Findings. In the recordings, the reading style students use is similar to informational reading in contemporary educational settings: it is fragmentary, facts-oriented, and procedure-oriented. The practice of finding correct answers, rather than analysing and discussing the contents of a text seems to continue from lessons organised around print textbooks in the 1960s to the inquiry-based and digital teaching of today.

Originality/value. The paper seeks to analyse document work and documentary practices by regarding “information” as a discursive construction in a particular era with material consequences in particular contexts, rather than as a theoretical and analytical concept. It also problematises the notion that new digital technologies for producing, organising, finding, using, and disseminating documents have drastically changed people’s behaviours and practices in educational and other contexts.

This article explores how the post 9/11 climate has impacted Muslim-Canadians' information practices, including their uses of various information sources, and their attitudes and perceptions
regarding their information rights in a post 9/11 world. A survey was conducted in 2004-2005 with 120 participants and supplemented by in-depth interviews. The population consisted of Muslim students enrolled in post-secondary institutions in Toronto, Ontario. The findings highlight Muslims' malaise in a post 9/11 environment; the deep mistrust they hold vis-à-vis the media; the importance they give to media and information literacy skills for all; as well as a call for increased introspection inside the Muslim community(ies). The study contributes to shedding light on a community that has often being talked and written about but not often heard. By soliciting Muslim individuals' perspectives, we enable them to voice their opinions about how the 9/11 events impacted on their lives and how their information practices inform their experiences.

This study examines the information practices of homeless queer, trans and two-spirit youth living in Toronto. As part of this exploratory ethnographic study, semi-structured interviews where conducted with 11 youth who are currently homeless or have been homeless in the recent past. Data was also collected through participant observation at a Toronto drop-in program that supports homeless queer youth between the ages of 16 and 29. The ethnography provides a description of their habits regarding information seeking, sharing and use. The data introduces a wide range of needs relating to sexual or gender identity, housing, safety, sex work, harm reduction, creativity and performance, education, relationships and leisure. It also introduces key information sources including friends and peers, shelter staff and drop-in workers as well as practices such as texting, using university libraries, and the use of social media sites like Facebook and Craigslist.

Introduction - The concept of information needs is significant within the field of Information Needs Seeking and Use. How information needs can be studied empirically is however something that has been called into question. The main aim of this paper is to explore the methodological consequences of discursively oriented theories when studying information needs. The discussion takes its starting point in the model of information needs and question formations presented by Robert S. Taylor in the 1960s. Method - The empirical material used for exemplifying the proposed methodology consists of video recordings from an ethnographical study conducted at a Swedish primary school. Analysis - The analysis is guided by concepts based in sociocultural and dialogistic theories and is directed towards question-negotiations in conversations and interactions in naturalistic settings. Conclusions - Earlier studies of information needs are often based on the idea of an individually constructed actual need as it is presented in the first level in Taylor's model. With an interest in the two latter levels of the model the analytical focus is shifted to question-negotiations which are seen as the results of situated discursive and collective efforts. This shift entails a methodological shift in the study of information needs.

Boundary objects (BO) are abstract or physical artefacts that reside in the interfaces between organisations or groups of people. The concept of BO, introduced by Star and Griesemer in an article in 1989, has been used in a broad variety of studies in different research communities from management to computer science and different fields of information science. The aim of this panel, composed of experienced BO researchers, is to provide an overview of and introduction to the state of the art of information science research informed by the theory for the researchers and practitioners participating in the conference; to illustrate the variety of studies and contexts in which the notion of BOs can be found useful in explicating connections between collections, cultures and communities; and to push forward the state of the art of BO-oriented information science research by discussing new empirical and practical areas of interest and the theory itself.

Many scholars have discussed their use of theory and metatheory to study the social nature of information. The approaches brought to the table by doctoral students and junior faculty will continue to shape the future of the information field with a social perspective. This panel will present the theoretical frameworks used by four emerging information scholars (Koepfler, Vitak, Alemanne, and Snyder), who will describe the social nature of information in the context of existing information research and social theory. Each will answer three questions: How and why did they include particular theories in their research framework? How is their framework and its view of the social nature of information unique? What are the implications of their work for studying the social nature of information? The moderator (Worrall), panelists, and discussant (Rosenbaum) will encourage new thinking and discussion among researchers and practitioners interested in social and theoretically-based studies of information.

This paper reports on the findings of a study examining how theatre professionals (actors, directors and others) make sense of the works of a culturally iconic author (William Shakespeare). The findings of the study are based on interviews with 35 theatre professionals in Canada, Finland and the UK. The study aims a more holistic approach to the study of information behaviour, one which acknowledges the complexity of sense-making as more than the problem-solving behaviour of individualsas an embodied, social process, involving emotion as well as rationality. In doing so it draws on theoretical approaches from a range of different disciplines and traditions, including Dervin"s Sense-Making, Foucault"s discourse analysis and Derrida"s deconstructionism. Rather than active searching, the focus of most information research, the events that participants described as having the greatest influence on their understanding of Shakespeare were informal "social" interactions. Participants in the study frequently explicitly linked their engagements with texts to their interactions with other people. Participants frequently described the significant influences on their constructions in terms of long-term relationshipswith other people and with the written work of authors. For theatre professionals, understanding Shakespeare involved much more than a cerebral process: their professional lives are based on the ability to embody their knowledge: they need to manifest their understanding in the physical world as physical actions in physical space. The study demonstrates the need for information behaviour research to expand its focus beyond active information seeking and searching and to devote greater attention (both theoretical and empirical) to such factors as: informal knowledge-sharing; sense-making as an affective as well as a rational process; and embodiment as a central aspect of information use.

Introduction. This paper concerns the concept of information use. The aim of the study is to understand how information use, as an activity, is shaped when project-based methods are used in primary school. The particular focus here is information use which involves visual information resources. It relates to the overarching aim of a set of studies describing and illustrating how information literacies are enacted and socially shaped in Swedish primary schools. Method. 25 booklets, produced by children at a Swedish primary school when working with project-based assignments, were collected during an ethnographical study. Analysis. An analysis of the relationships between pictures and text in the 25 booklets was conducted. Results. The analysis suggests that the pictures in the booklets are subordinated to written text and their functions are decorative and illustrative. Pictures are seldom used for explaining or narrating. Conclusions. An underpinning idea of the study is to understan...

Abstract The objective of this study is to understand how blind users behave when accessing the Web, using a screen reader, and what factors influence and determine their actions. It is grounded on the social approach to studies of information users and on Situated Cognition, theoretical position which argues that human actions are adapted to the situation and to the context, influenced by its various dimensions. Considering the scope and objectives of the research, a qualitative study was carried out with eight users, selected from the snowball sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and interaction tests in natural environment. The research results show that the participants had their first contact with the computer, the Internet and the Web from different forms and motivations, this process .

Resumo O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender como os usuários cegos se comportam durante o acesso à Web, utilizando o leitor de telas, e quais elementos influenciam e determinam suas ações. Fundamenta-se na abordagem social para os estudos de usuários da informação e na Cognição Situada, vertente teórica que defende que as ações dos sujeitos são adaptadas à situação e ao contexto, sofrendo influência das suas diversas dimensões. Considerando o escopo e os objetivos da pesquisa, realizou-se um estudo qualitativo com oito usuários, selecionados a partir da técnica bola de neve. Os dados foram coletados por meio de entrevistas semi-estruturadas em profundidade e ensaios de interação em ambiente natural. Os resultados da pesquisa mostram que os participantes tiveram seus primeiros contatos com o computador, a Internet e a Web a partir de formas e motivações distintas, sendo este processo permeado por diversas emoções, prevalecendo as positivas. Já em relação aos elementos que influenciam o comportamento e as ações dos usuários durante o acesso mediado por leitores de tela, destacam-se: o ambiente físico e o digital, os recursos e programas adicionais usados, a flexibilidade e improviso baseados em experiências anteriores, as necessidades e as motivações para acesso e uso e as lembranças visuais e conceitos que possuem.

Este artigo é oriundo dos resultados da dissertação intitulada (In)acessibilidade na Web para pessoas com deficiência visual: um estudo de usuários à luz da cognição situada, defendida em junho de 2013 no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG).

Asked to edit and critically review the exchange between philosopher Rafael Capurro and Linda Treude on the concept of information, the below linked document presents the final version of the exchange, including my contributions to copy and content editing as well as bibliographic suggestions from my review. The final version of the document can be accessed at http://www.capurro.de/moraes.html

- Jared Bielby


"The term information is omnipresent in academic research as well as in everyday life. Buzz words such as information society, information age or information overload are floating around everywhere. But what do we mean exactly with 'information' in different contexts?

The philosopher Rafael Capurro dealt with this question in the late 1970's in his PhD thesis on the concept of information. Especially the philosophical community was suffering at that time from a lack of reflection thereupon. Capurro tried to fill this gap. The following remark by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007) had a particular impact on him.

"Today we are getting accustomed [...] to understand information as something different from matter and consciousness. What we have discovered is an old truth in a new place. It is the Platonic eidos, the Aristotelian form, expressed in words such that also a human being in the 20th century can learn about them."

Weizsäcker’s step back to the history of ideas motivated Capurro also to deal with ethical issues of the information society particularly since the rise of the internet. The handling of digital information requires new cultural skills that are addressed with the term 'information literacy.' In the last ten years many projects in the Library and Information Science field (LIS) include or are even focused on information literacy (IL). In many of these projects there is a pre-understanding that IL has to do with the ability to find, filter, and process digital information. At the same time, there is a gap between this pre-understanding and an the ongoing academic discussion on the concept of information. The following dialogue deals particularly with this gap."

~ Linda Treude

Introduction. This paper concerns the concept of information use. The aim of the study is to understand how information use, as an activity, is shaped when project-based methods are used in primary school. The particular focus here is information use which involves visual information resources. It relates to the overarching aim of a set of studies describing and illustrating how information literacies are enacted and socially shaped in Swedish primary schools. Method. 25 booklets, produced by children at a Swedish primary school when working with project-based assignments, were collected during an ethnographical study. Analysis. An analysis of the relationships between pictures and text in the 25 booklets was conducted. Results. The analysis suggests that the pictures in the booklets are subordinated to written text and their functions are decorative and illustrative. Pictures are seldom used for explaining or narrating. Conclusions. An underpinning idea of the study is to understand information activities as purposeful within the settings where they take place. Given earlier research indicating that project-based working methods tend to be focused on the reproduction of facts and the making of products rather than on contents, it could be argued that the children's use of pictures in this study is purposeful. However, if this use of pictures is a desirable outcome could be a matter of discussion. The findings may be relevant for developing teaching in the multimodal aspects of information use.

This paper qualitatively examines how members of a large private Facebook group view the risks of information disclosure to their privacy and the strategies they employ to navigate and manage those risks. The paper adds to an emerging interest in how privacy is managed collectively and within dynamic large groups, thus moving beyond established knowledge of privacy management on individual and small-scale levels. The work builds on semi-structured interviews with 20 members of a private Facebook group and draws on Communication Privacy Management theory. The study shows how privacy management practices are enacted at individual, intragroup, and group levels. Findings show that participants associate very high risks with sharing private information in the group, partly because it consists of a mix of known others and strangers, who are potentially geographically co-located. They adopt several strategies for managing and protecting their privacy at all three levels. The risks associat...

Reports and studies often show that seniors suffer disproportionately during disasters. Yet seniors' handling of information and communication technology is largely overlooked. Based on a qualitative study comprising interviews and focus groups, this research shows important properties of seniors' practices with information in critical settings. Seniors embody and tap into local knowledge, mingle offline and take online cues about emergency situations, and maintain trust towards institutions. We discuss the need to pursue and diversify investigation on this topic, as well as the role of seniors as gatekeepers rather than considering them helpless individuals. This research contributes to a better understanding of seniors' use of digital resources by highlighting their role in information sharing in disaster settings. We pave the way for future research to inform policy making and support seniors' survival in future disasters.

Information researchers have been urged to move beyond the individual behaviourist paradigm to broaden our view of information activities. Increasingly information scholars suggest we treat information activities as practices, and to re-position information research within the bounds of practice theory. But what exactly is practice theory, how does it relate to information, and what does it offer to information research?
This paper takes as its starting point the arguments of those who suggest an information practice approach can better identify and analyse the full range of information activities. It briefly examines the practice approach in the social sciences and identifies seven essential characteristics of practices: action-based, temporal, situated, continuous and recurrent, embodied, mediated and social. Using these characteristics as categories of activity, the researcher can develop a conceptual framework of practice which may be profitably utilised in an empirical examination of human information.
The paper concludes that an examination of information activities in accordance with this framework of practice could allow researchers to gain a wider understanding of all that goes into a person becoming informed.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore and explicate documentation ideals parallel to information policy, and by means of this analysis demonstrate how the concept “documentation ideals” is an analytical tool for engaging with political and institutional contexts of information practices.

Design/methodology/approach
– The paper is based on a case study of documentation ideals in a debate about quality in archaeological documentation. The methodology draws on idea analysis, and on the science and technology studies’ controversy studies approach.

Findings
– The paper explicates three documentation ideals, how these ideals allocate responsibility for documentation to different actors, how the ideals assign roles to practitioners, and how the ideals point to different beneficiaries of the documentation. Furthermore, the analysis highlights ideas about two different means to reach the documentation ideals.

Research limitations/implications
– The case’s debate reflects opinions of Northern European professionals.

Social implications
– The paper illuminates how documentation ideals tweak and even contest formal information policy in claims on the documentation and on the practitioners doing documentation.

Originality/value
– Documentation ideal analysis is crucial as a complement to formal information policy analysis and to analysis guided by practice theory in attempts to understand the contexts of information practices and documentation, insights central for developing information literacies.

Introduction. This paper presents a qualitative investigation into whether online discourse, produced by first year undergraduate students, can demonstrate their information capabilities as a socially-enacted practice and be used to assess their information literacy. Method. Discourse analysis was used to categorise online discussion board postings produced by first-year UK undergraduate students as part of a formative online peer assessment exercise. Analysis. Online discourse was the node of analysis which sought to identify patterns of language within the social and cultural contexts in which they occurred. Postings were inductively analysed through manual content analysis. Results. Postings appeared to embody student's discursive competence in information literacy, especially their level of information discernment and what constituted a quality 'reference' for an assignment. However, they also demonstrated that 'references' perform a certain function within this discourse as an agreed construct between tutor, student and librarian. Conclusions. Students were engaged in the process of becoming good scholars by using appropriate online postings to create valid arguments through assessing other's work, but what they did not do was question received meanings regarding the quality of found information they used as evidence.

Utilizing de Certeau’s concepts of “tactics” and “strategies,” and Chatman’s “information poverty,” this study examines the information practices of the fishermen in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh. Using faceto- face surveys, this study gathers data from 102 fishermen in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh. The findings of the study reveal that the majority of fishermen (“fisher folks”) studied regularly need information on weather, fish buying and selling prices, daily consumable products, entertainment, and religion. Fisher folks in this study heavily rely on their informal information networks (e.g., family and friends) to meet their diverse information needs. The study also reports various information challenges faced by the participants. It is evident in this study that fisher folks, due to unwelcoming information environment of strategic institutions (e.g., various government agencies), tactically avoid services and information provided by them. A call for radical change in “informat...

Many scholars have discussed their use of theory and metatheory to study the social nature of information. The approaches brought to the table by doctoral students and junior faculty will continue to shape the future of the information field with a social perspective. This panel will present the theoretical frameworks used by four emerging information scholars (Koepfler, Vitak, Alemanne, and Snyder), who will describe the social nature of information in the context of existing information research and social theory. Each will answer three questions: How and why did they include particular theories in their research framework? How is their framework and its view of the social nature of information unique? What are the implications of their work for studying the social nature of information? The moderator (Worrall), panelists, and discussant (Rosenbaum) will encourage new thinking and discussion among researchers and practitioners interested in social and theoretically-based studies o...

Introduction: Practice and sociocultural theories suggest that human sociality is fundamentally mediated by tools and artefacts. This paper investigates the role one such artefact-the document-plays in the actions of decision-makers in local government. Method: Decision-makers in local government-council employees, elected officials and members of a community panel-have been interviewed to determine how they generate and share knowledge. The interviews have been designed to develop a rich picture of routine and normative information activities. Analysis: Four concepts central to the exploration and investigation of mediation in practice and sociocultural theories have been identified and defined: materiality, contextuality, representation and agency. Data relating to the information activities of the participants in the study have been analysed in relation to these concepts to examine the role documents play in the daily activities of the decision makers. Results: The research finds that documents are essential artefacts of decision-making, and are integral to the activities of the participants. Their use is routine, normative and, often, unremarked. Materiality determines working practices, context provides meaning, and documents are representations of work done, sometimes having a performative aspect which confers a certain agency. Conclusion: In this study documents are more than simple mechanisms for transmission of information: they are essential tools without which the actions of decision-making cannot take place. They represent work done, given meaning by-and giving meaning to-the practices in which they are enmeshed.

ABSTRACT Few studies in the Library and Information Studies field investigate how vocational workers use information in their learning and workplace practice. This paper introduces doctoral research that explores how apprentice chefs develop information literacy practices that enable them to learn their trade and engage with the professional practices of chefs.