Abstract Knowledge of ovarian cancer patients' information practices around cancer genetic testing (GT) is needed to inform interventions that promote patient access to GT‐related information. We interviewed 21 ovarian cancer patients and survivors who had GT as part of the treatment process and analyzed the transcripts using the qualitative content analysis method. We found that patients' information practices, manifested in their information‐seeking mode, information sources utilized, information assessment, and information use, showed three distinct styles: passive, semi‐active, and active. Patients with the passive style primarily received information from clinical sources, encountered information, or delegated information‐seeking to family members; they were not inclined to assess information themselves and seldom used it to learn or influence others. Women with semi‐active and active styles adopted more active information‐seeking modes to approach information, utilized information sources beyond clinical settings, attempted to assess the information found, and actively used it to learn, educate others, or advocate GT to family and friends. Guided by the social ecological model, we found multiple levels of influences, including personal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal, acting as motivators or barriers to patients' information practice. Based on these findings, we discussed strategies to promote patient access to GT‐related information.

With the advancement of precision medicine, genetic information becomes increasingly important as it informs cancer prevention and treatment. However, an understanding of how ovarian cancer (OC) patients and survivors access genetic testing (GT)-related information is limited, especially how they search online for such information. We interviewed 21 OC patients and survivors about their GT experience and GT-related information search experience. Of the 21 participants, ten (47.6%) conducted online searches. These participants chose sources based on particular evaluative criteria and displayed specific intentions in searching in the first instance. Participants were concerned about online information quality and were frustrated with information understandability and a lack of OC-specific GT information. Future studies with representative samples are needed to understand ovarian cancer patients’ genetic information search behavior to inform the design of search systems and information sources that can effectively address their unmet information needs.

Abstract Information quality (IQ) is key to users' satisfaction with information systems. Understanding what IQ means to users can effectively inform system improvement. Existing inquiries into self‐tracking data quality primarily focus on accuracy. Interviewing 20 consumers who had self‐tracked health indicators for at least 6 months, we identified eight dimensions that consumers apply to evaluate self‐tracking data quality: value‐added, accuracy, completeness, accessibility, ease of understanding, trustworthiness, aesthetics, and invasiveness. These dimensions fell into four categories—intrinsic, contextual, representational, and accessibility—suggesting that consumers judge self‐tracking data quality not only based on the data's inherent quality but also considering tasks at hand, the clarity of data representation, and data accessibility. We also found that consumers' self‐tracking data quality judgments are shaped primarily by their goals or motivations, subjective experience with tracked activities, mental models of how systems work, self‐tracking tools' reputation, cost, and design, and domain knowledge and intuition, but less by more objective criteria such as scientific research results, validated devices, or consultation with experts. Future studies should develop and validate a scale for measuring consumers' perceptions of self‐tracking data quality and commit efforts to develop technologies and training materials to enhance consumers' ability to evaluate data quality.

The promise and challenge of information management in the humanities has garnered a great deal of attention and interest (Bulger et al., ; Freiman et al., ; Trace & Karadkar, ; University of Minnesota Libraries, ; Wilson & Patrick, ). Research libraries and archives, as well as groups from within the humanities disciplines themselves, are being tasked with providing robust support for information management practices, including helping to engage humanities scholars with appropriate digital technologies in ways that are sensitive to disciplinary‐based cultures and practices. However, significant barriers impede this work, primarily because the infrastructure (services, tools, and collaborative networks) to support scholarly information management is still under development. Under the aegis of the Scholars Tracking Archival Resources (STAR) project we are studying how humanities scholars gather and manage primary source materials with a goal of developing software to support their information management practices. This article reports the findings from our interviews with 26 humanities scholars, in conjunction with a set of initial requirements for a mobile application that will support scholars in capturing documents, recreating the archival context, and uploading these documents to cloud storage for access and sharing from other devices.

Archives are invaluable resources for those interested in understanding past activities and events. What makes archival collections valuable as evidence is that they are organized in a way that connects the materials to their creator(s), their associated activities, and recordkeeping systems. In order to create this organization archivists engage in a complex process that involves arranging materials physically and intellectually. This arrangement focuses on documenting the original order of the materials and making them evident to secondary users. The time‐consuming nature of this process has resulted in a massive backlog of unprocessed (and thus unavailable) collections, which represents an impediment to the investigative activities of scholars and researchers. To help alleviate such a situation, this article presents a novel approach to archival arrangement, using tabletop computers and digitized images. The article explains the project design and implementation and discusses the evaluation results. This work provides several major contributions to the field, including: a new system that allows archival collections to be arranged digitally, new methods and metrics for evaluating archival arrangements, a detailed analysis of the steps involved in archival arrangement and how they correlate with the final outcomes of the process, and a method for analyzing arrangements based on the topologies created by processing archivists.

Abstract This article marries the study of serious leisure pursuits with library and information science's (LIS) interest in people's everyday use, need, seeking, and sharing of information. Using a qualitative approach, the role of information as a phenomenon was examined in relation to the leisure activity of hobbyist collecting. In the process, a model and a typology for these collectors were developed. We find that the information needs and information seeking of hobbyist collectors is best represented as an interrelationship between information and object needs, information sources, and interactions between collectors and their publics. Our model of the role of information in a particular domain of hobbyist collecting moves away from the idea of one individual seeking information from formal systems and shifts towards a model that takes seriously the social milieu of a community. This collecting community represents a layer of a social system with complex interactions and specialized information needs that vary across collector types. Only the serious collectors habitually engage in information seeking and, occasionally, in information dissemination, in the traditional sense, yet information flows through the community and serves as a critical resource for sustaining individual and communal collecting activities.

Abstract This article presents findings from a research study (Trace, 2004) that looked at a particular aspect of human information behavior: children's information creation in a classroom setting. In the portion of the study described here, naturalism and ethnomethodology are used as theoretical frameworks to investigate informal documents as an information genre. Although previous studies have considered the role of informal documents within the classroom, little sustained attention has been paid to pre‐adolescents, particularly in terms of how they create unofficial or vernacular literacies both to navigate their growing awareness of the formal (albeit sometimes “hidden”) curriculum and, on occasion, to subvert it, positing an alternative economy that itself can be “hidden” via surreptitious use of informal documents. Making explicit the ties that exist between these objects and the worlds in which they are embedded demonstrates that informal documents hold a particular relevance for children within this social context (Garfinkel & Bittner, 1999). Furthermore, this article demonstrates that an ethnomethodologically informed viewpoint of information creation brings a level of dignity and determination to an individual's human information behavior, allowing us to appreciate the human ability to recontextualize or reenvisage sanctioned or official information genres to meet our own needs and purposes.