How Passionate People Seek and Share Various Forms of Information in Their Serious Leisure

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an analytical review of the existing literature about Human Information Behaviour (HIB) in the context of Serious Leisure (SL). Various forms of information activities in this context have been identified and categorised to depict common patterns in information seeking and sharing. The findings show the informational aspect of SL is a rich and productive topic in HIB because it entails the continuous pursuit and recreation of knowledge and often involves several types of information-related actions including information seeking, searching, browsing, retrieving, gathering, saving, organising, sharing, evaluating, measuring, analysing, producing and disseminating. The paper also presents a tentative model of predominant information sources in SL based on the analytical literature review and theoretical speculation. This preliminary model categorises SL activities into three main groups including (1) intellectual pursuits, (2) creating or collecting physical objects/materials/products and (3) experiential activities. Similarly, the paper categorises SL participants into three major groups of appreciators, producers/collectors and performers. Each category has its own priorities, source preferences and information behaviour. The findings also indicate that exploring various aspects of HIB in the SL domain is still an emerging ground and that the majority of studies have been thus far been qualitative. As a result, further research needs to be done to gain a more comprehensive picture of this area and to validate the growing knowledge base with larger samples and further settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Serious leisure
• human information behaviour
• information seeking
• information sharing
• communities of interests
• information grounds

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of a research project about Human Information Behaviour in the context of Serious Leisure funded by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in 2018-2020. The author expresses his deep appreciation to Marion Bannister, Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Information Studies at CSU, for her great contribution in this literature review. The author also thanks Professor Annemaree Lloyd for her useful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Charles Sturt University [A541.3101.30603].

Notes on contributors

Yazdan Mansourian

Yazdan Mansourian is a lecturer in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Australia. He received his PhD in Information Science from The University of Sheffield (2003 to 2006). The title of his thesis was ‘Information Visibility on the Web and Conceptions of Success and Failure in Web Searching’. Yazdan has a BSc degree in Agricultural Engineering (1991-1995) from Guilan University in Iran and an MA degree in LIS from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (1998-2001). During January 2007 to June 2017 he was faculty member at Kharazmi University in Tehran, Iran. From 2011 to 2016 he was Director of the Central Library at this university and also Head of LIS Department during that time. Yazdan joined CSU in August 2017 and currently his main research interest is Human Information Behaviour (HIB) in various contexts such as Serious Leisure. Yazdan teaches Information Society, Information Sources and Research, Research in Practice, Community Histories and Information Services around the World.