Scrapbook - Unit 4.2

Even though I posted this information on Blackboard, I would like to keep it here in my scrapbook as well. Below you will find my reaction to Hartel's Serious Leisure article.

Hartel's article on 'Serious Leisure' gives a completely different perspective on information needs. The majority of the time articles researching information needs revolve around the professional or academic worlds. Hartel's article forces us to address the fact that we all have information needs in the non-professional world (i.e., our personal lives). For example, I am very interested (don't ask) in juvenile science fiction novels (in fact I would say that I'm addicted to them). I am frequently searching online for a new author or a new book series or to read what someone has written about my favorite series in this genre (it's the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld in case you were wondering). I crave information on this topic! The fact that I use Google, Barnes and Noble (both online and in person), Amazon, and the author's website are important insights into how I, as an information seeker, go about fulfilling my needs. This angle of information seeking rarely gets studies by information professionals. I think studying the information needs sought in our personal lives is well worth studying and an important topic that will help us gain more insight on the information needs of users.

The other side to this of course, is that what people search for in their leisure time is only useful to you if you're Google. Academic search engines really should not be concerned with leisure time - it's out of the scope of their purpose. Of course, it is always useful as an information professional to understand as much as possible about information seeking behavior (of any kind), so studying 'serious leisure' will only give us more information about users.


In addition to reading Hartel's article, I read one of the references from it:

Ross, C. (1999). Finding without seeking: the information encounter in the context of reading for pleasure. Information Processing and Management, 35, 783-799.

As an avid reader myself I enjoyed reading the article and learning how other people search for books. One of my favorite quotes from one of her interviewees was:

"Sometimes you have to be ready for a book. There are some books it's not your time to read, or it's not their time to be read by you. Sometimes a book just has nothing to say to you, and that's probably because you have to have had some prior experience." - p.789

It's so true! Now for my analysis:

Catherine Ross's article on Reading for Pleasure was very interesting for me because I consider myself a 'heavy reader' as were the people she interviewed. The goal of her study (which included information from about 200 avid readers) was to figure out how people go about choosing books to read for pleasure. After all, this is an information seeking event - just not the traditional kind we here about in the academic world. Her results showed that most people choose books because they have been recommended by friends and family or they are from a beloved known author. Other reasons are a result of browsing: the title was interesting, they liked the cover, or the blurb on the back/inside jacket made them interested. Very rarely did they say they heard about it online (although some people did report this as a reason for buying a book). Personally, I find books in a variety of ways: hearing about it from friends and family, picking an author that I know I like, browsing the aisles of the book store, or asking a few of the staff members at the Bull's Head that have given me great advice in the past. The online way I would seek information online would still fall under the category of recommendations from family and friends; for instance, I know that I trust Alex's taste in books so if she were to post information on her favorite books to her blog then I would most likely purchase some of the books she recommends. The article just goes to show that there is an entire world of information seeking that we don't traditionally read about as LIS students. Even though this group of information seekers is not using an information system necessarily, we can still gain knowledge about the information seeking habits of users who seek information for recreational purposes.