This article examines how search engines and socialnetworking sites enable and constrain the identity-related information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) millennials in the United States. I employ affordances as a process concept to understand the recursive relationship between individuals and technologies and envision information practices as an outcome of this relationship. Guided by this conceptual framework, I conducted 30 semistructured interviews with LGBTQ+ individuals between the ages of 18 and 38. Data analysis identified 3 key affordances that enable and constrain participants' information practices: visibility, anonymity, and association. The findings indicate that participants are highly skilled in appropriating technological features to engage in desired information practices, such as seeking and creating. However, they also must contend with significant sociocultural barriers encoded into these features, which reinforce heteroand cisnormative identity discourses. Library practitioners and systems designers can use these findings to offer services and systems inclusive of LGBTQ+ populations.

Online question-answering (Q&A) services are becoming increasingly popular among information seekers. We divide them into two categories, social Q&A (SQA) and virtual reference (VR), and examine how experts (librarians) and end users (students) evaluate information within both categories. To accomplish this, we first performed an extensive literature review and compiled a list of the aspects found to contribute to a "good" answer. These aspects were divided among three high-level concepts: relevance, quality, and satisfaction. We then interviewed both experts and users, asking them first to reflect on their online Q&A experiences and then comment on our list of aspects. These interviews uncovered two main disparities. One disparity was found between users' expectations with these services and how information was actually delivered among them, and the other disparity between the perceptions of users and experts with regard to the aforementioned three characteristics of relevance, quality, and satisfaction. Using qualitative analyses of both the interviews and relevant literature, we suggest ways to create better hybrid solutions for online Q&A and to bridge the gap between experts' and users' understandings of relevance, quality, and satisfaction, as well as the perceived importance of each in contributing to a good answer.

Online question-answering (Q&A) services are becoming increasingly popular among information seekers. While online Q&A services encompass both virtual reference service (VRS) and social Q&A (SQA), SQA services, such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers, have experienced more success in reaching out to the masses and leveraging subsequent participation. However, the large volume of content on some of the more popular SQA sites renders participants unable to answer some posted questions adequately or even at all. To reduce this latter category of questions that do not receive an answer, the current paper explores reasons for why fact-based questions fail on a specific Q&A service. For this exploration and analyses, thousands of failed questions were collected from Yahoo! Answers extracting only those that were fact-based, information-seeking questions, while opinion/adviceseeking questions were discarded. A typology was then created to code reasons of failures for these questions using a grounded theory approach. Using this typology, suggestions are proposed for how the questions could be restructured or redirected to another Q&A service (possibly a VRS), so users would have a better chance of receiving an answer.

Although LGBTQ+ populations experience significant health challenges, little research exists that investigates their health from an informational perspective. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the health information practices of LGBTQ+ communities in South Carolina, focusing on how sociocultural context shapes these practices. Thirty semi-structured interviews with South Carolina LGBTQ+ community leaders analyzed using open qualitative coding informed the development of a conceptual framework describing their information practices. Findings show that participants engaged in two broad types of practices -protective and defensive -as responses to risks and barriers experienced, which are in turn produced by social and structural factors. Findings advance information practices and marginalization approaches and offer ways for medical professionals to improve service to LGBTQ+ populations.

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