Our focus is on the study of information needs, seeking, and use in different contexts. However, this chapter spends little time on this focus as such. Instead, this chapter asks the question “What is context?” on the assumption that to ask a question that is so little asked may prove useful. This chapter looks for possible answers in the literatures of the social sciences generally, both philo...

OBJECTIVE To appraise learning behaviour among participants of faculty development programme in a diverse group setting. METHODS The qualitative study was conducted at the Capacity Building Centre of the National Institute of Health and Social Sciences, Islamabad, in March-April 2010. From all the participants who planned to be healthcare educators, 27 were selected for the study. Methodology...

People often turn to their social networks to fulfill their information needs. We conducted a study of question asking and answering (Q&A) behavior on Twitter. We found that the most popular question types were rhetorical and factual. Surprisingly, along with entertainment and technology questions, people asked personal and health-related questions. The majority of questions received no respons...

Social media provides a digital space – a meeting place, for different people, often representing one or more groups in a society. The use of this space during a disaster, especially where information needs are high and the availability of factually accurate and ethically sourced data is scarce, has increased substantially over the last 5-10 years. This paper attempts to address communication i...

Real-world information needs are generally complex, yet almost all research focuses on either relatively simple search based on queries or recommendation based on profiles. It is difficult to gain insight into complex information needs from observational studies with existing systems; potentially complex needs are obscured by the systems’ limitations. In this paper we study explicit information...

More and more often, we face the necessity of extracting appropriately reshaped knowledge from an integrated representation of the information space. Be such a global representation a central database, a global view of several ones or an ontological representation of an information domain, we face the need to define personalised views for the knowledge stakeholders: single users, companies or a...