Exploring Context in Information Behavior: Seeker, Situation, Surroundings, and Shared Identities(Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services)

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Preface 1. Introduction 2. Literature Review: The influence of context on information behavior 3. Mapping the conceptual space of context 4. Discussion 5. Definition and conclusions 6. Further Reading References Author Biography

About the Author :
Naresh Agarwal is an Associate Professor at the Simmons School of Library and Information Science (College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences) in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS)'s Department of Information Systems, School of Computing. Naresh has published more than 40 articles in international journals, conference proceedings, and as book chapters in the fields of information behavior and knowledge management. As of November 2017, researchers have cited his work more than 370 times (as listed by Google Scholar). Naresh looks at the way people look for information and the contextual factors that impact their choice of information sources. He seeks to understand and synthesize the apparent contradictions in this phenomenon and tries to reconcile multiple perspectives. Apart from seeking, Naresh also studies serendipitous information encountering and the causes and effects—both on the recipient and the sender—of information stopping and information avoidance behaviors, especially by people who use smartphones and social media. Naresh teaches courses in technology and web development, theories of information science, knowledge management, and evaluation of information services. He has held various leadership positions at ASIS&T (the Association for Information Science and Technology). He was a member of its Board of Directors from 2012–2014. Naresh was the Chair of its Membership Committee (2015–2017), the Conference Co-Chair of its 80th Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., Oct. 27–Nov. 1, 2017, and he was awarded the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award in 2012. Prior to entering the doctoral program at NUS, Naresh worked for six years in technology roles in the voice-over-IP, bioInformatics, and digital cinema industries. Gary Marchionini is the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Information Science in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Ph.D. is from Wayne State University in mathematics education with an emphasis on educational computing. His research interests are in information seeking in electronic environments, digital libraries, human-computer interaction, digital government and information technology policy. He has had grants or contracts from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Council on Library Resources, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, the Kellogg Foundation, and NASA, among others. He was the Conference Chair for the 1996 ACM Digital Library Conference and program chair for the 2002 ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. He is editor-in-chief for ACM Transactions on Information Systems and serves on the editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals. He has published more than 150 articles, chapters, and conference papers in the information science, computer science, and education literatures. He founded the Interaction Design Laboratory at UNC-CH.

Review :
Exploring Context in Information Behavior: Seeker, Situation, Surroundings, and Shared Identities/em> is recommended to various groups of readers. Apart from the obvious researcher in information behavior, academics, and graduate students, it also holds value for systems designers and those developing information services and information retrieval systems, for example, to study human‐information interaction from the perspective of the individual actor involved in the processes. Naresh Agarwal can be congratulated on expanding attempts to understand the complexities of context, and presenting a book that achieved its purpose to explore definitions, theoretical and empirical studies on context, and mapping the conceptual space of context in information behavior. As claimed by the author, the book should provide designers of search systems with a better understanding of context as they seek to meet the needs and demands of information seekers." - Ina Fourie - Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology