This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors in the context of people's everyday lives as part of a larger study of information behaviors (IB). 34 participants from across 6 countries maintained a daily information journal or diary -mainly through a secure web log -for two weeks, to an aggregate of 468 participant days over five months. The textrich diary data was analyzed using Grounded Theory analysis. The findings indicate that information avoidance is a common phenomenon in everyday life and consisted of both passive avoidance and active avoidance. This has implications for several aspects of peoples' lives including health, finance, and personal relationships.

This paper examines issues relating to the perceptions and adoption of open access (OA) and institutional repositories. Using a survey research design, we collected data from academics and other researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) at a university in Australia. We looked at factors influencing choice of publishers and journal outlets, as well as the use of social media and nontraditional channels for scholarly communication. We used an online questionnaire to collect data and used descriptive statistics to analyse the data. Our findings suggest that researchers are highly influenced by traditional measures of quality, such as journal impact factor, and are less concerned with making their work more findable and promoting it through social media. This highlights a disconnect between researchers’ desired outcomes and the efforts that they put in toward the same. Our findings also suggest that institutional policies have the potential to increase OA awareness and adoption. This study contributes to the growing literature on scholarly communication by offering evidence from the HASS field, where limited studies have been conducted. Based on the findings, we recommend that academic librarians engage with faculty through outreach and workshops to change perceptions of OA and the institutional repository.

We examine 2,465,145

This paper explores the potential of using chatbots to improve the academic research experience for university students with a literature based discussion reflecting on a prototype being developed at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). The paper proposes that information professionals need to adapt emerging technologies such as chatbots to innovate, improve and support library services. Designing a positive experience for the user is essential to ensure that such technological solutions are sustainable. In this exploratory paper, we argue that it is important that librarians engage with the conversational design of the library chatbot in collaboration with the technology developers in order to make it useful, friendly, trustworthy, and customisable for university students.

The vision of a citizen-designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network is a version of technological utopianism that could be called the vision of "the electronic agora." In the original democracy, Athens, the agora was the marketplace, and more -it was where citizens met to talk, gossip, argue, size each other up, find the weak spots in political ideas by debating about them.Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 1993, para.59. AbstractThe article is a research essay based on a thematic interdisciplinary literature-review that examines social media using the lens of selected theories and concepts in information science and allied disciplines such as communication and media ecology. The specific focus of the article is how social media has altered our notion of cyberspace from being an abstract information space to being perceived as an actual place, for social media more than any other digital media before it, embodies cyberspace and reifies it as a real place, both in our everyday lives and in our public spheres. Anything can happen in this dynamic and heterogeneous place, just as it can in a real place, including protests and revolutions.