Information sharing as a means to reach collective understanding: A study of design scholars' information practices

Gigging it in the shire: information practices of Renaissance faire performers and artisans

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to explore the information behaviors (IBs) of performers and artisan/vendors in American Renaissance faires. This research is exploratory in nature and seeks to discover how existing IB theories, including embodied information practices, can explain the information seeking and use of performers and artisan vendors working in American Renaissance faires.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used semi-structured qualitative interviews with three artisan/vendors and 12 performers at Renaissance faires to explore their IBs around the roles at the festivals. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed from an exploratory framework, looking for how existing IB theories might explain the findings.

Findings

Although the participants in this study described information practices that were embodied and corporeal, they shared more experiences around the complex and fraught nature of information sharing within the Renaissance faire community. Information sharing prohibitions were related to power dynamics and the participants' roles as gig or contingent workers.

Originality/value

This was the first study to explore the IBs of Renaissance faire performers and artisan/vendors and as such, was exploratory in nature. The findings point to several areas for additional research.

Expectant, anxious and excited: the information journey of Chinese first-time mothers

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the information needs and behaviors of Chinese first-time mothers from the perspective of information journey theory.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses the popular coding language Python to write a program to extract 366 posts published by first-time mothers in the Babytree community of China's largest maternal and infant platform. Content analysis is used to analyze and encode the collected data.

Findings

This study summarizes the information needs of first-time mothers in China specifically, which includes six aspects of health, pregnancy care, postpartum parenting, socialization, self-actualization, and entertainment. Then, based on its hierarchical and stage characteristics, more flexible information needs matrix for Chinese first-time mothers has been developed to reflect their changing 15 types of information needs more fully. Finally, it constructs the information journey model of Chinese first-time mothers including five stages.

Originality/value

This is the first time that information journey theory has been applied to the research on information needs and behaviors of first-time mothers. The authors have also further expanded the information seeking and acquisition phases and found new gaps in the phases to further refine the information journey model. This study can help us better understand the online information needs and behaviors of Chinese first-time mothers and provide support for organizations and online health community managers to develop new information services or improve the quality of existing services.

Peer review

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2021-0538.

Q&A participation and behavioral patterns on academic social networking sites: a comparative study of academic, corporate and government institutions on ResearchGate

Purpose

This paper aims to explore question and answer (Q&A) participation and behavioral patterns on academic social networking sites (ASNSs) from the perspective of multiple subjects such as academic, corporate and government institutions.

Design/methodology/approach

Focused on the Q&A service of ASNSs, this study chooses ResearchGate (RG) as the target ASNS and collects a large-scale data set from it, involving a sample of users and a Q&A sample about academic, corporate and government institutions. First, it studies the law of Q&A participation and the distribution of the type of user according to the sample of users. Second, it compares question-asking behavior and question-answering behavior stimulated by questions among the three types of institutions based on the Q&A sample. Finally, it discusses the Q&A participation and behavioral patterns of the three types of institutions in academic Q&A exchanges with full consideration of institutional attributes, and provides some suggestions for institutions and ASNSs.

Findings

The results show that these three types of institutions generally have a low level of participation in the Q&A service of RG, and the numbers of questions and answers proposed by institutional users conform to the power-law distribution. There are differences in Q&A participation and Q&A behavioral patterns among academic, corporate and government institutions. Government and academic institutions have more users participating in the Q&A service and their users are more willing to ask questions, while corporate institutions have fewer users who participate in the Q&A service and their users are inclined to provide answers. Questions from corporate institutions attract much more attention than those from the other two types of institutions.

Originality/value

This study reveals and compares the Q&A participation and the behavioral patterns of the three types of institutions in academic Q&A, thus deepening the understanding of the attributes of institutions in the academic information exchange context. In practice, the results can help guide different institutions to use the Q&A service of ASNSs more effectively and help ASNSs to better optimize their Q&A service.

“Bouncing ideas” as a complex information practice: information seeking, sharing, creation, and cooperation

Purpose

“Bouncing ideas” is a phrase used colloquially to illustrate a way of advancing ideas in the workplace. While described by some as a key part of their information work, it has remained largely unexplored in the information science literature. As a metaphor used to depict information work, it describes a process of working on ideas in conjunction with others. This paper examines how early career academics use the term when describing their academic work.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reports on one of the findings from a larger, in-depth study that examined the information behaviour of early career academics undergoing career transitions, which was carried out using constructivist grounded theory (CGT). CGT provides both a framework for the systematic collection (that included multiple interviews and check-ins with 20 early career academics) and analysis of the data (that consisted of multiple rounds of iterative, inductive coding).

Findings

The findings identify the component parts of bouncing ideas, which include three component in-formation activities – information seeking, information sharing and information creation – and are undertaken as cooperative information work (joint work for a shared purpose, but the benefits of the work may not be equal between participants).

Originality/value

Bouncing ideas is proposed as a complex information practice, defined as engaging in a temporary cooperative effort that involves social information exchange in order to gain help and/or support for an intellectual endeavour to create new information. The work identifies that more research into bouncing ideas is needed to more fully explore the distinct component behaviours that take place whilst bouncing ideas and the social conditions that foster this collaborative exchange.

Practice ecology of knowledge management—connecting the formal, informal and personal

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the coexistence of formal, informal and personal knowledge management (KM) practices as they support employees' everyday work in organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative study involving 12 in-depth interviews and 30 hours of observations in a small, quickly growing, knowledge-intensive company.

Findings

Formal, informal and personal KM practices were all found to be relevant and interconnected in supporting everyday work in the organization. This suggests a shift from understanding KM as an organizational approach to ecology, shaped by multiple actors and concerns and extending over the formal/informal as well as organizational/personal divides. Interrelationships between formal, informal and personal KM practices took various forms. Among each of these KM categories were practices that contributed in a unique way, without having a functional parallel in other categories. Some KM practices had a strong functional overlap and were competing. Moreover, some formal, informal and personal KM practices formed complementary relationships.

Research limitations/implications

Findings are based on fieldwork in only one organization.

Practical implications

Organizations would benefit from the formal, informal and personal KM practices being complementarily connected. As these connections are sustained by employees in everyday work, effective management of KM ecology needs a collective and distributed effort.

Originality/value

This paper is one of the very few empirical accounts that problematizes the coexistence of formal, informal and personal KM practices and suggests a practice-ecology perspective through which their interrelationships could be studied.

Affordances supporting mothers’ engagement in information-related activities through Facebook groups

Social networking sites have become indispensable information and communication tools in everyday life. This qualitative study investigated the information-related activities and affordances of a Facebook group for foreign mothers living in Sweden. Four key information activities were identified: posting, monitoring, commenting and searching. These activities show how the group members accessed the information resources embedded within the group in a variety of visible, invisible, active and passive modes. The article concludes with a discussion of how these different modes are facilitated by the affordances of visibility, accessibility, persistence and associations.

Podcasts for Nonformal Learning: Using Social Media for Creating Personal Learning Environments, Personal Learning Networks

The use of second-generation web technology (WEB2) in education is emphasising the role of social media as educational sources. Researchers that are analysing personal learning environments (Schaffert, Kalz, 2009; Dabbagh, Kitsantas, 2012), personal learning networks (Couros, 2010) suggest the importance of social media, although this emphasis is attributed to the collaborative interaction of learners. To comprehensively assess the potential of podcasts as social media in the creation of personal learning environments, personal learning networks, the research described in this article does not restrict the definition of podcasts as the potential of collaboration provided by social media. In this article, attention is directed towards the potential of podcasts in the creation of personal learning environment and personal learning networks. By using integrated information behaviour module analysis to determine if the students of Lithuanian higher education institutions value the potential of informal learning provided by podcasts. To determine if these technologies are used for the formation of personal learning environments, personal learning networks, a discussion group research was conducted. During the research the analysis of participant podcast usage showed there is interaction between media content used for recreation and media content used for formal and informal learning. This means that the participants of the research use podcasts to create personal learning environments. On the other hand, this interaction is minimal, created only by the learners and reasoned by the search of educational podcasts. The analysis of the experiences of the discussion participants revealed that the collaborative interaction between learners involved in the research in searching, sharing and using podcasts in the process of learning is not intensive, it is typically fragmented. This allows to point out that the communities that use podcasts for informal learning are not forming. This shows that the potential of podcasts in creating a learning network is not fulfilled, and that podcasts don’t inspire participatory learning.

The Role of Information Experience on IT Professionals’ Twitter Use

Twitter acts as an information gateway as it provides a place where professionals network and share their knowledge. Twitter has increasingly influenced the way people use and share information. However, limited research demonstrates IT professionals’ information experience on Twitter impacts the way they use it for professional purposes. The study aimed to understand how such information experiences impact on the way IT professionals use Twitter for professional purposes. Eleven IT professionals were recruited for this study to understand the participants’ information experience through their own individual perspective, with the data analysed using constructive grounded theory. This study revealed that IT professionals’ information experience plays a vital role in creating professional networking and knowledge sharing in online spaces. These lived experiences influence the way IT professionals use Twitter for professional purposes. Thus, the findings of this study contribute to theoretical perspectives in the understanding of information experience perspectives within Twitter, along with a foundational understanding of the ways in which microblogging is used for professional purposes. The findings can help organisations understand and provide for this emerging channel of professional information sharing for its staff and stakeholders.

Organizational changes, trust and information sharing: an empirical study

Purpose

While there is relatively plenty of evidence for the positive impact of communication on the perceptions of organizational change, how organizational changes affect information sharing is relatively unknown. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a favorable perception of ongoing organizational changes has a positive impact on information sharing and whether trust mediates this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

A questionnaire (n=317) was administered to the employees of a large Finnish multinational organization. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses based on earlier research findings.

Findings

The results show that a positive perception of recent organizational changes improves information sharing both directly and indirectly, mediated by trust. Consequently, when changes are perceived negatively, employees recoil from information sharing which is known to have negative implications for organizations.

Research limitations/implications

Data were collected in a single organization. The nature of the specific changes in the studied organization and its particularities undoubtedly had an effect on respondents’ perceptions.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to organizational information management research by elaborating on the relationship between organizational changes and interpersonal information sharing between employees. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative study confirming the impact of the perception of organizational changes on employee information-sharing behavior.

Emerging practices for managing user misconduct in online news media comments sections

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to bridge a gap in knowledge on the professional information practices of a group of people whose daily work of managing user-generated content online exposes them to users whom they perceive as acting aggressively or otherwise offensively online.

Design/methodology/approach

Journalists’ narratives of practices for managing and responding to user comments perceived as offensive are analysed qualitatively. For this purpose, ten interviews with journalists from nine different news organisations in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Canada were conducted.

Findings

The study finds that the environment in which the journalists work plays a vital role in the evolution of the practices. Practices, indissolubly tied to the contexts or sites in which people’s activities take place, are conditioned by moral values, traditions and collective experiences which journalists enact through the practice they engage in when they are dealing with user posts online. The site, conceived as an information landscape, is that of the newsroom. Practices for managing users online evolve through actors participating in a process of learning and their ability to adopt the cultural norms and values of their environment.

Originality/value

This study sheds light on the mechanisms behind the evolution of practices for handling user-generated content online and it reports on the importance of properties such as norms, values and emotions for how things are done in the information landscape of news journalism.

Information activities of commercial taxi drivers in Saki, Nigeria

Information behaviour of people differs according to the nature of their tasks and other activities they engage in. Therefore, the study of information behaviour is essential for different classes of individuals in the society. This study investigated the information behaviour of commercial taxi drivers in Saki, Nigeria. Survey design was adopted. Thirty-five taxi drivers were interviewed. The drivers had a variety of information needs, ranging from general information to specific information about their jobs. Interpersonal sources of information, which include discussion with friends, colleagues, and family members, were the preferred sources of information. They listened to radio and watched television, but at a very minimal level. The low educational status of the drivers was identified as a major cause of their reliance on interpersonal sources of information. The taxi drivers shared information among themselves during meetings, relaxation periods, and casual discussions. The use of the Internet to seek and share information was rare among the drivers.

Teacher trainees’ information sharing activities and identity positioning on Facebook

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge of how identity is connected to information sharing activities in social media during pre-school teacher training.

Design/methodology/approach

An ethnographic study is performed where 249 students at a Swedish pre-school teacher-training programme are followed through participant observations from November 2013 to January 2014, and from September 2014 to January 2015. The material produced includes 230 conversations from a Facebook Group used by 210 students and several teachers, field notes and transcribed interviews with nine students. Comparative analysis is used to analyse the Facebook conversations to identify ways of positioning identity and engaging in information sharing activities. Interviews with students are analysed to contextualise and validate the findings from the online interactions.

Findings

Three identity positions are identified: discussion-oriented learner, goal-oriented learner and customer-oriented learner. The way a student commits to others, to ideas and to a career choice affects their identity positions and information sharing activities. Results suggest that information sharing with social media should be understood as a powerful device for identity development in pre-school teacher training.

Research limitations/implications

This study is designed to provide detailed accounts with high validity on the expense of a high degree of representativeness.

Originality/value

No previous library and information science-studies have been presented that explore the relationship between the identity of learners and the information sharing activities in which they engage, in the context of social media or in relation to teacher training.

Apt information literacy? A case of interdisciplinary scholarly communication

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore the aptness of “information literacy”, conceptualized as a socially contextualized phenomenon, for analyses of interdisciplinary scholarly communication.

Design/methodology/approach

– The paper presents a conceptual analysis. Two influential representatives of the social turn in the information literacy literature are taken as starting points: Annemaree Lloyd’s conceptualization of “information literacy practice”, and Jack Andersen’s conceptualization of information literacy as “genre knowledge”. Their positioning of information literacy as a socially contextualized phenomenon – by use of practice theories and rhetorical genre theory, respectively, – is analysed against an illustrative example of interdisciplinary scholarly communication.

Findings

– Conceptualizations by Lloyd and Andersen explain information literacy as socially contextualized in terms of stable norms and understandings shared in social communities. Their concepts have the potential of explaining changes and innovations in social practices including scholarly communication. If we combine genre-theoretical and practice-theoretical concepts – and accentuate the open-endedness of social practices and of genres – we can enhance the understanding of information literacy in settings of interdisciplinary scholarly communication where the actors involved lack shared conventions and assumptions.

Originality/value

– The paper suggests that the fluid features of social contexts should be accounted for in the information literacy literature. By combining genre-theoretical and practice-theoretical concepts in a novel way it offers such an account. It provides a useful framework for understanding the phenomenon of information literacy in interdisciplinary scholarly communication.

A practice-based exploration of the enactment of information literacy among PhD students in an interdisciplinary research field

Purpose

– The study aims to explore the interaction between the students, the material objects surrounding them, and their social site. The purpose of this paper is to identify and elucidate information literacy as it is being enacted within a complex and heterogeneous community of PhD students.

Design/methodology/approach

– The study is conducted from a practice-based perspective, according to which information literacy is conceived as learnt through interaction within the socio-material practice where the learner is active. In order to produce empirical material, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten doctoral students in an interdisciplinary research network, and their workplaces were visited.

Findings

– The PhD students in this interdisciplinary network are more or less constantly engaged in the enactment of information literacy. It takes place in dialogue with others who can be both co-located and distantly located, and occurs through discussions about work in progress, through processes of evaluation and assessment of texts and authors, and through mundane everyday activities such as participating in meetings, which offer insights into how to navigate, in the broadest sense, the world of academia. A crucial part of the enactment of information literacy, which in practice is inseparable from interaction with others, is to pay attention to physical surroundings and material objects.

Practical implications

– The findings have implications for prospective PhD students in interdisciplinary fields, for their supervisors, and potentially also for librarians who are supposed to serve these groups.

Originality/value

– Research on the information literacies of PhD students in interdisciplinary fields is scarce. The practice-based approach applied in this study offers an extended and deepened understanding of the enactment of information literacy among PhD students in one interdisciplinary research practice.

Collaborative research networks in health: a pragmatic scoping study for the development of an imaging network

Background

Collaborative research networks are often touted as a solution for enhancing the translation of knowledge, but questions remain about how to evaluate their impact on health service delivery. This pragmatic scoping study explored the enabling factors for developing and supporting a collaborative imaging network in a metropolitan university in Australia.

Methods

An advisory group was established to provide governance and to identify key informants and participants. Focus group discussions (n = 2) and semi-structured interviews (n = 22) were facilitated with representatives from a broad range of disciplines. In addition, a survey, a review of relevant websites (n = 15) and a broad review of the literature were undertaken to elicit information on collaborative research networks and perceived needs and factors that would support their involvement in a multi-disciplinary collaborative research network. Findings were de-identified and broad themes were identified.

Results

Participants identified human factors as having priority for developing and sustaining a collaborative research network. In particular, leadership, a shared vision and a communication plan that includes social media were identified as crucial for sustaining an imaging network in health research. It is important to develop metrics that map relationships between network members and the role that communication tools can contribute to this process.

Conclusions

This study confirms that human factors remain significant across a range of collaborative endeavours. The use of focus group discussions, interviews, and literature and website reviews means we can now strongly recommend the primacy of human factors. More work is needed to identify how the network operates and what specific indicators or metrics help build the capacity of clinicians and scientists to participate in translational research.

To open or not to open? Determinants of open government data

In recent years, open government data has become an important movement among government administrations around the world. While there is still limited open data research conducted in East Asia, this study explores the complexity of open data initiatives in Taiwan. In particular, the influential factors and their impacts on open data initiatives are investigated from four perspectives: technology, organization, legislation and policy, and environment. Legislation and policy is found to have the most significant impact while agencies’ existing regulations and policies act as constraints. The factors residing in organizational and environmental perspectives follow as the secondary impacts. Technological factors also exist but are considered to be relatively more easily resolved with sufficient support. While the identified factors act as determinants to influence government agencies’ intentions towards open data participation, it is also found that open data is closely related to interagency information sharing, and the two activities in the long term are expected to reinforce to each other iteratively. In addition, practical implications are discussed to provide practitioners with insights. Lastly, the contributions, limitations and potential future research of the current study are listed in the Conclusion section.

Exploring the determinants of cross-boundary information sharing in the public sector: An e-Government case study in Taiwan

This paper explores the complexity of cross-boundary information sharing in the public sector. In particular, determinants influencing interagency information sharing are investigated and discussed, and a case study of Taiwan e-Government is employed. Four perspectives, including technology, organization, legislation and policy, and environment, are used to conduct this exploratory inquiry. Legislation and policy is found to be the most influential factor among government agencies participating in information-sharing initiatives. Organizational factors are also found to be significant, but less so than legislation and policy. Technological factors are considered relatively more easily addressed when compared with legislation and policy and organizational factors. Finally, situational factors are also found to have respective impacts on interagency information sharing. In addition to factors that are discussed in the current literature, newly identified factors are illustrated to provide insights. Moreover, in order to better conceptualize how identified factors determine agencies’ intentions towards cross-boundary information sharing, theory of planned behaviour is used to form a theoretical discussion by integrating the identified factors of the study. Practical implications are also provided to address how cross-boundary information sharing among government agencies can be better achieved. Lastly, the conclusion outlines the contributions and limitations of this research and suggests future studies related to the current work.