The current research explores how intermediaries seek information from patrons, in particular by analyzing intermediaries' elicitation utterances through three dimensions-linguistic forms, utterance purposes, and communicative functions-to determine whether indeed any dimension appeared consistently, to be called "elicitation styles." Five intermediaries from four academic libraries (three national university libraries, one private university library) and one research institute library participated in the study. Thirty patrons with 30 genuine search requests were recruited; thus, 30 patron/intermediary information retrieval interactions making a total of 30 encounters were collected. Video/audio data were taped. Dialogues between patron and intermediary were transcribed. Statistical analysis revealed three types of elicitation styles among the five intermediaries, labeled, (1) situationally oriented, (2) functionally oriented, and (3) stereotyped. This study seeks an explanation for different elicitation styles. Qualitative analysis was applied to investigate "inquiring minds." An inquiring mind is termed to represent a mentality or tendency that one elicits certain threads of questions influenced by professional beliefs, individual characteristics, tasks, goals, and interactional contexts in conversation. The results of qualitative analysis specified three modes of inquiring minds of the intermediaries, namely: (1) information problem detection, (2) query formulation process, and (3) database instructions.

Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by repeated steps in the search space vs. exploitation, using the resources encountered. We conjecture that this tradeoff characterizes how a user deals with uncertainty and its two aspects, risk and ambiguity in economic theory. Risk is related to the perceived quality of the actually visited patch of information, and can be reduced by exploiting and understanding the patch to a better extent. Ambiguity, on the other hand, is the opportunity cost of having higher quality patches elsewhere in the search space. The aforementioned tradeoff depends on many attributes, including traits of the user: at the two extreme ends of the spectrum, analytic and wholistic searchers employ entirely different strategies. The former type focuses on exploitation first, interspersed with bouts of exploration, whereas the latter type prefers to explore the search space first and consume later. Our findings from an eye-tracking study of experts' interactions with novel search interfaces in the biomedical domain suggest that user traits of cognitive styles and perceived search task difficulty are significantly correlated with eye gaze and search behavior. We also demonstrate that perceived risk shifts the balance between exploration and exploitation in either type of users, tilting it against vs. in favor of ambiguity minimization. Since the pattern of behavior in information foraging is quintessentially sequential, risk and ambiguity minimization cannot happen simultaneously, leading to a fundamental limit on how good such a tradeoff can be. This in turn connects information seeking with the emergent field of quantum decision theory.

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There is a paucity of research examining the everyday-life information seeking of young people, especially investigating the role that the news media has in providing information to young people for use in their everyday lives. A qualitative, interpretivist approach is adopted, involving 34 students, ages 18 to 25, from an Australian university. First, 20 students were interviewed about their news seeking (including topics and sources). Then 14 students participated in verbal protocol analysis, which involved a series of tasks concerning online and print newspapers. Lastly, students were interviewed about how they sought everyday-life information and whether they thought that they had incidentally acquired or encountered information on everyday-life topics in online or print newspapers in the recent past. Findings indicated that, contrary to expectations, traditional print media still played a role for young people, and social media were perceived as important for communication with friends, rather than for news gathering. Purposeful information seeking was more likely to occur online, but both print and online newspapers retained an incidental role in providing information to students for their everyday lives. Participants used a range of media to suit their particular needs and purposes. Thus, access to a wide variety of sources is important for everyday-life information seeking (ELIS) by young people.

Information behavior and practices (IBP) research has been repeatedly criticized for having little impact on information systems development (ISD). Claiming that there is a complete disconnect would be an exaggeration but it is apparent that it is not always easy to translate findings of IBP research to workable design recommendations. Based on a reading of earlier literature and a closer investigation of three illustrative example contexts, this article underlines that the value of IBP research for ISD lies in its capability to inform ISD of the variety of ways people deal with information beyond individual systems, their own wants and designers' assumptions. Moreover, it highlights that the implications of information systems go beyond their primary users. Instead of overemphasizing the contextuality of findings, a part of IBP research would benefit from an increased focus on explicating its epistemological extents and limits and identifying, which findings are transferable, what distinguishes specific contexts, what are their defining constraints and priorities, and what aspects of their uniqueness are assumptions and simple clichés.

The interdisciplinary field known as digital humanities (DH) is represented in various forms in the teaching and research practiced in iSchools. Building on the work of an iSchools organization committee charged with exploring digital humanities curricula, we present findings from a series of related studies exploring aspects of DH teaching, education, and research in iSchools, often in collaboration with other units and disciplines. Through a survey of iSchool programs and an online DH course registry, we investigate the various education models for DH training found in iSchools, followed by a detailed look at DH courses and curricula, explored through analysis of course syllabi and course descriptions. We take a brief look at collaborative disciplines with which iSchools cooperate on DH research projects or in offering DH education. Next, we explore DH careers through an analysis of relevant job advertisements. Finally, we offer some observations about the management and administrative challenges and opportunities

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