Personal information management (PIM) is an interdisciplinary research area with established theoretical foundations from information science and applied empirical research from human‐computer interaction (HCI). The increasingly popular activity tracking technology (ATT) has given rise to a new type of personal information about one's daily physical activities, which has not been scrutinized under theoretical frameworks in PIM. This article presents an in‐depth qualitative interview study supplemented by participant‐driven photo elicitation with 20 long‐term activity tracker users about how they manage personal information generated by ATT. Key findings include the identification of two distinctive user groups (i.e., consistent casual users and powers users) among long‐term activity tracker users and an in‐depth portrayal of these groups' PIM behaviors with ATT. These behaviors include concurrent and subsequent PIM practices, 6 types of PIM activities, and the use of a spectrum of PIM tools. This research provides timely theoretical updates to PIM under the background of self‐tracking technologies, outlines empirical implications to improve ATT in support of PIM, and offers recommendations for incorporating participant‐driven photo elicitation as a supplementary method for qualitative interviews in information behavior research.

We examine how teens from an urban area in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA regulate their use of technology. We framed our research using everyday life information seeking theory [43] and information ecologies [35]. Using a survey, audio and photo diary study, creative free response activity, and semi-structured interviews, we examine teens' perceptions of their everyday life technology use and factors that influence changes in that use, with a focus on understanding non-use, low use, and intentional self-regulation. We describe four factors impacting these practices, including local policies and access, affective factors, life stage and future goals, and relationships. We describe how shifting use practices function in the lives of these teens and discuss the importance of acknowledging teens' skills and preferences for supporting their technology use management.

In this multiple case study of two high schools in the USA, we use interview and focus group data to examine the experiences of teen-age students when they friend and interact with teachers, high school administrators, parents, and other adults on social network sites (SNS). We identify several types of teen-adult interactions on SNS, including finding information, community building, and mentoring online skills, and we connect these findings to literature on homophily and context collapse. We also report on social media norms and policies of the schools where our fieldwork was conducted. We discuss how organizational policies surrounding social media use can inhibit or reinforce the development of age-homophilous networks and thereby encourage or reduce opportunities for teen-adult interaction online. Finally, we conclude that boundary work associated with managing these complex social experiences, though awkward at times, can be an important learning experience for adults and young people alike.

The majority of American teens use social network sites (SNSs) but little is known about how they leverage their online social networks to find information. As part of a larger study on social media and information behaviors, we surveyed 158 high school students to learn about their online question asking and answering practices. We describe which teens are most likely to ask and answer questions, what they ask about, on which sites they ask questions, and how useful they perceive SNSs to be as information sources. When possible, we draw comparisons with findings in the literature about adult populations. We contextualize these findings using early insights from interviews and focus groups with 80 teens and discuss how perceptions of audience, privacy concerns, and self-presentation all play a role in teens' use of SNSs to ask and answer questions.

The issue of how teens choose social networks and information communication technologies (ICT's) for personal communication is complex. This study focused on describing howU.S. teens from a highly technological suburban high school selectICT's for personal communication purposes. Two research questions guided the study: (a) What factors influence high school seniors’ selection of online social networks and otherICT's for everyday communication? (b) How can social network theory (SNT) help to explain how teens select online social networks and otherICT's for everyday communication purposes? Using focus groups, a purposive sample of 45 teens were asked to discuss (a) their preferred methods for communicating with friends and family and why, (b) the reasons why they chose to engage (or not to engage) in online social networking, (c) how they selectedICT's for social networking and other communication purposes, and (d) how they decided whom to accept as online “friends.” Findings indicated that many factors influenced participants’ICTselection practices including six major categories of selection factors: relationship factors, information/communication factors, social factors, systems factors, self‐protection factors, and recipient factors.SNTwas also helpful in explaining how “friendship” was a major determining factor in their communication media and platform choices.

Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model. Jeannette Woodward. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2005. 234 pp. $38.00. (ISBN: 0-8389-0888-8) In the late 1990s, a flourish of publishing in the professional library literature suggested that libraries could learn some important lessons from bookstores in how to increase their service success. Steve Coffman (1998, 2000) wrote some of the most provocative material. Coffman's writing and the writing of a number of other professionals led to passionate responses from those working in libraries and in bookstores as well. Those in favor of bookstores as models for library service (e.g., Feinberg, 1998) offered arguments such as bookstores' greater success in drawing people in, and bookstores' greater success at making their materials and services attractive to the public. Those opposing bookstores as models for library services (e.g., Raymond, 1998) countered that, among other arguments, the missions of the two types of organizations are oppositional, and people use bookstores and libraries for different reasons. Indeed, a number of user studies have shown bookstore customers and library patrons to overlap (e.g., Young & Von Seggern, 2001). Woodward's (2005) new book revisits this idea of bookstores as role models for libraries. She contends that the major difference between the positive public image of bookstores and the negative public image of libraries is bookstores' customer-driven philosophy, thereby ignoring the touchy fees-for-services question and sidestepping much of the deepest controversy associated with the debate. As positive as her view of bookstores is, she also recognizes the importance and uniqueness of the library mission. The first three chapters are the most original and the most interesting. Chapter 1, “Why Bookstores Are So Appealing” takes the reader on an imaginary visual tour of a typical bookstore. Woodward uses keen observations to create a detailed mental image of a carefully maintained customer-pleasing bookstore, with a prime location, ample parking, well-maintained building, professional decorating scheme, clear signage, attractive displays, and pleasant background music. In Chapter 2, “Comparing Libraries and Bookstores,” she paints a much more dreary picture of a typical public library (if there is such a thing), with a poorly lit parking lot, decaying building, intimidating circulation desk, “lobby with its display case of dusty fossil rocks” (p. 14), and “harvest gold and avocado green seating area” (p. 14). Sadly, her description rings eerily true and sets up a strong basis for her argument that libraries have much to learn from bookstores. In Chapter 3, “Focusing on the Bottom Line,” Woodward suggests that one reason bookstores are so successful in attracting and maintaining customers is their emphasis on profit-making as their one over-arching goal. In contrast, she argues that libraries lack an easily identifiable, clearly measurable overarching goal, resulting in a general lack of service focus. She proposes customer satisfaction as a single, overarching goal of library services. However, as Woodward readily admits, customer satisfaction is far less measurable than profitability. The author's arguments for using library statistics to measure customer satisfaction are unlikely to yield particularly valid or reliable measurements, bringing to question the feasibility of using customer satisfaction as an equivalent to the bookstore's bottom line. Beginning with Chapter 4, the book becomes more of a beginners' marketing and publicity guide than an analysis of the library–bookstore question. The remaining chapter subheadings accurately describe the tone and contents of the bulk of the volume: “Valuing Customer Service,” “Identifying Customer Needs,” “When the System Crashes: Using Technology to Enhance Not Defeat the Library,” “One Library, One Goal: Establishing Clear Priorities,” “What's all this about Ambiance?” “The Art of Display,” “Finding Their Way: The Importance of Signage,” “Marketing Our Wares,” “Creating Promotional Materials,” “Serving the Library's E-Patrons,” and “Generating Publicity for the Library.” These are useful topics, but similar discussions exist in a wide variety of marketing textbooks and guides, including a number that are geared specifically toward libraries. These chapters add little to the author's main theme of bookstores as role models for libraries. In chapter 15, “Food and Drink in the Library,” Woodward returns more closely to her original theme of analyzing why the public often views bookstores as more desirable public places than libraries. She suggests that food and drink are a big draw for the public, and that libraries would go a long way toward increasing their patronage if they were to sell refreshments. The concept of coffee does seem to be central to the public's modern image of bookstores. I have taught a graduate course entitled INFO650: Public Library Service annually for the past three years. During the course, I ask students to write down the first three words that come to mind when they hear the word bookstore. In each class, the word coffee has been the word listed the most often, cited each year at least twice as much as the second most commonly listed word (books). Even students who do not drink coffee tend to list coffee as one of their three words, indicating the extent to which the two concepts are tied in people's minds. Woodward focuses on practical advice for setting up a library café, such as investigating local food-services regulations and describing how to send out RFP's (Request for Proposals), omitting discussion of the overwhelming frequency of library café failures. This omission is representative of the generally optimistic tone of the book. The book concludes with chapter 16, “Finding the Time and the Money,” in which the author suggests staff refocusing and the use of volunteers, followed by a brief “Conclusion” chapter. Both of these concluding chapters echo the personal, optimistic tone used throughout the book, which at times is inspiring, and at times seems naïve (“Although it may sound a bit shocking, lots of good and worthy projects can be swept under the rug, and no one will be the wiser” [p. 208]). Overall, this is a very readable volume with some worthwhile ideas. Although a few citations are given at the end of each chapter, there are hardly any in-text citations to indicate how these sources were used or to indicate when ideas discussed are other than the author's. Moreover, the sources listed are almost exclusively articles from professional journals and magazines, as opposed to research-based works. The omission of a discussion of the fees-for-services issue is also disappointing. Despite these two criticisms, the book merits reading for anyone interested in considering why such a large portion of the public views bookstores so much more positively than they view libraries. This book should find an eager audience among librarians hoping to improve their public images, and among those looking for a practical introductory marketing/public relations guide.

Qualitative Research for the Information Professional: A Practical Handbook. G.E. Gorman and Peter Clayton. London: Facet, 2005. 282 pp. $95.00. (ISBN: 1-85604-472-6) Published just 7 years after the first edition was released, this second edition of Qualitative Research for the Information Professional: A Practical Handbook lives up to its title; it is indeed practical. Most general texts about qualitative research are long on theory and short on specific instructions (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Miles & Huberman, 1984). The opposite is true here. A qualitative research newcomer could conceivably read this text and then undertake a small-scale project on his or her own. The newcomer would be wise to supplement this highly pragmatic text with another text of greater theoretical value (such as the previously mentioned Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; or Miles & Huberman, 1984), because Gorman and Clayton's volume discusses specific qualitative methods within a largely decontextualized framework, divorcing the methods from the various philosophical and sociological perspectives that underlie them. The book is divided into 14 chapters. Each chapter discusses a step in the qualitative research process or details a particular qualitative research method. Each chapter begins with Focus Questions, which briefly summarize the main themes, and concludes with suggestions for further reading. Each chapter also includes one or more Research Scenarios (some fictional, some apparently drawn from the authors' own experiences, although citations to particular projects are not given) to illustrate the main points discussed in the chapter. For example, Chapter 6, Beginning Fieldwork, includes a research scenario entitled Gaining Entry by Fitting the Surroundings. It discusses various entry barriers met by a researcher who studied the status of librarians within the organizational culture of a theological college, and his search for a suitable key informant. Tell clients that you will be providing tea, coffee and fruit juice as well as cakes and chocolate biscuits (and then make sure you remember to do this); invite a dozen participants—and then hope that at least six will turn up not too long after the session was supposed to commence. (p. 156) Although such advice may seem overly obvious to seasoned researchers, it can be very helpful to those who have conducted little or no research involving human subjects. As for the main topics covered, Chapter 1 explains some of the ideas that underpin the qualitative research perspective in simple, concrete terms. It includes a definition of qualitative research, describes its common characteristics, discusses the relationship of qualitative research to information work, and describes some of the differences between qualitative and quantitative research. Happily, the authors give credence to both research perspectives, advocating the use of both to compensate for inherent weaknesses in each. Chapter 2, Evaluating Qualitative Research, shows how traditional quantitative research evaluation criteria must be modified, and some criteria abandoned altogether, when evaluating qualitative work. The unusual presentation of a chapter describing evaluation near the beginning of the text, instead of nearer to the end, works nicely in an introductory text, because it serves to define qualitative research in greater detail and to separate it more clearly from its quantitative sibling. Chapter 3, Qualitative Research Design in Information Organizations, shows that unlike more traditional research approaches, qualitative inquiry is not a linear process. The authors use visual models to depict the circular, iterative qualitative research process, although they admit that research patterns vary from project to project. This chapter also introduces four qualitative research methods profiled in more depth later in the text: observation, interviewing, group discussion, and historical study. The discussion of these methods at this point is somewhat simplistic, as in saying that observation “provide[s] useful insights into unconscious behavior” (p. 40). Observation also reveals conscious behavior, such as social behaviors that people perform as conscious choices to conform to or to flout societal expectations. It is a strange choice to separate group discussion from the broader umbrella of interviewing, considering that the group discussion category here is comprised only of focus groups and the nominal group technique. Although it can be reasonably argued that the nominal group technique falls outside the realm of interviewing, focus groups are generally thought of as one type of group interview (e.g., Frey & Fontana, 1991), and in fact the terms focus group and group interview are often interchanged (Fontana & Frey, 1998). The next chapter, Case Studies in Information Organizations, introduces the case study as a useful form of action research and shows how a number of qualitative methods (e.g., participant observation and various types of interviews) can be used to collect data about various aspects of an information organization. However, as the methods themselves have not yet been described in any detail, the placement of this chapter seems premature and might lead to confusion for the novice researcher. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on fieldwork, including topic selection, research problem and research question formulation, literature reviewing, study location and participant selection, and research plan formulation. Again, the placement of these chapters before the detailed discussions of the data collection methods is somewhat awkward—Chapter 6 includes a section entitled Choice of Data Collection Technique, which would mean more to a reader familiar with the techniques discussed than to the inexperienced researcher. The next four chapters finally delve into the four categories of qualitative data collection: observation, interviewing, group discussion techniques, and historical investigation. Of particular interest is the presentation of the nominal group technique (NGT), which is similar to the Delphi method but not limited to use with experts, and can be used with students or other novice user groups. Whereas the first three of these methods chapters (Observation, Interviewing, and Group Discussion Techniques) emphasize practical tips, the Historical Investigation chapter, written by Sidney J. Shep, takes more of a theoretical approach, highlighting the subjective nature of history. Shep defines history as “the representation of the past in the work of historians” (p. 163) and “the past as we know it from the interpretations of historians based on the critical study of the widest possible range of relevant sources” (p. 163). He goes on to discuss identifying and locating sources, assessing sources, interpreting data, and reporting findings. He also discusses in some depth the use of oral history in qualitative research. In a second reading of the data, usually during the detailed data analysis stage described below, you might identify new categories or decide to divide a category into two… Another step would be to write a sentence defining the category and clarifying the context when appropriate. After broad categories have been created in this initial reading you might then group them into like categories. Following these preliminary analytical steps, you begin to understand new ways of understanding the setting being investigated. (p. 209) The degree of clarity of this explanation is a strength of this book, as well as a weakness in many other similar texts. The penultimate chapter, Writing Qualitative Research Reports, draws heavily on Van Maanen's (1988) classic Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Although the writing styles and formats discussed are the ideals, the authors fail to mention that many qualitative researchers are forced to publish their work in the less-than-ideal traditional style and format of quantitative research reports, in order to place their work in venues that publish predominantly quantitative work. The final chapter presents a fabricated qualitative research report in its entirety. The text concludes with an 18-page annotated bibliography of qualitative research sources, written by Adela Clayton. It is grouped into three themes: Theoretical Contributions, Particular Methodologies and Issues, and Examples of Qualitative Research. Overall, the writing is clear and uncomplicated, and the authors occasionally interject humorous comments to sustain reader interest, for instance: “Telling an information professional how to conduct a literature review would be akin to showing a used car salesman how to wind back an odometer” (p. 72–73), and “We would term this ‘killing two birds with one stone’ if we were not, in fact, bird fanciers (we need not mention our poor aim)” (p. 243). This work would be particularly useful as a text in a master's-level action research course or as a how-to guide for a working information professional interested in undertaking an action research project.

Abstract This is the first part of a two‐part article that offers a theoretical and an empirical model of the everyday life information needs of urban teenagers. The qualitative methodology used to gather data for the development of the models included written surveys, audio journals, written activity logs, photographs, and semistructured group interviews. Twenty‐seven inner‐city teens aged 14 through 17 participated in the study. Data analysis took the form of iterative pattern coding using QSR NVivo 2 software (QSR International, 2002). The resulting theoretical model includes seven areas of urban teen development: the social self, the emotional self, the reflective self, the physical self, the creative self, the cognitive self, and the sexual self. The researchers conclude that the essence of teen everyday life information seeking (ELIS) is the gathering and processing of information to facilitate the teen‐to‐adulthood maturation process. ELIS is self‐exploration and world exploration that helps teens understand themselves and the social and physical worlds in which they live. This study shows the necessity of tying youth information‐seeking research to developmental theory in order to examine the reasons why adolescents engage in various information behaviors.

Abstract This is the second part of a two‐part article that presents a theoretical and an empirical model of the everyday life information needs of urban teenagers. Part 2 focuses on the derivation of the empirical model and on its relationship to the theoretical model presented in Part 1. Part 2 also provides examples from the project data to support each of the components of the empirical model, which ties 28 information needs topics to the seven independent variables in the theoretical model. Comparison of the empirical model to the results of past youth information behavior research shows that the participants in this study tended to have the same types of information needs as previous researchers have found with more advantaged, nonminority groups of teens. This finding is significant because it suggests that teenagers have similar information needs across socioeconomic, ethnic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. Due to the exploratory nature of this study, however, additional research is necessary to confirm this possibility.

Abstract This study investigated Simon's behavioral decision‐making theories of bounded rationality and satisficing in relation to young people's decision making in the World Wide Web, and considered the role of personal preferences in Web‐based decisions. It employed a qualitative research methodology involving group interviews with 22 adolescent females. Data analysis took the form of iterative pattern coding using QSR NUD*IST Vivo qualitative data analysis software. Data analysis revealed that the study participants did operate within the limits of bounded rationality. These limits took the form of time constraints, information overload, and physical constraints. Data analysis also uncovered two major satisficing behaviors—reduction and termination. Personal preference was found to play a major role in Web site evaluation in the areas of graphic/multimedia and subject content preferences. This study has related implications for Web site designers and for adult intermediaries who work with young people and the Web.