Research On Information Encountering

In the information user study domain, scholars tend to focus on information seeking behavior. Information seeking behavior greatly emphasizes on active information acquisition, which means that users have clear goal and planned way to find relevant information. However, users also passively find information without seeking. This passive information behavior is Information Encountering. The current information behavior research status is unbalanced:Most studies have focused on information seeking behavior, while ignoring Information Encountering. Under this situation, the study on Information Encountering not only has a theoretical significance, but also has practical significance. First, understanding Information Encountering plays an important role in building a more comprehensive model of user information behavior, while the comprehensive model again could be useful in the development of more personalized information systems. Second, research on Information Encountering is important to user education, perhaps in the future Information Literacy can increase the probability of Information Encountering.The author uses a generalized approach to study Information Encountering, with an aim to address the following issues:How to make Information Encountering research more systematic and integrate it to current information user study; what is the mechanism of Information Encountering. To answer these two questions, the dissertation systematically analyzes Information Encountering. At first, Information Encountering in different contexts is studied, and then a research framework is proposed on the basis of existing information behavior research. Finally, using the theory of distributed cognition, the dissertation discusses the mechanism of Information Encountering and put forward a model. This dissertation initially lays a theoretical foundation for domestic research. Follow-up research will take an empirical approach and try to verify the proposed model.