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This paper aims to discuss what it means to consider the information experience of academic information management from a constructivist grounded theory perspective. Using a doctoral study in progress as a case illustration, the authors demonstrate how information experience research applies a wide lens to achieve a holistic view of information management phenomena. By unifying a range of elements, and understanding information and its management to be inseparable from the totality of human experience, an information experience perspective offers a fresh approach to answering today's research questions.

The case illustration is a constructivist grounded theory study using interactive interviews, an original form of semi-structured qualitative interviews combined with card-sorting exercises (Conrad and Tucker, 2019), to deepen reflections by participants and externalize their information experiences. The constructivist variant of grounded theory offers an inductive, exploratory approach to address the highly contextualized information experiences of student-researchers in managing academic information.

Preliminary results are reported in the form of three interpretative categories that outline the key aspects of the information experience for student-researchers. By presenting these initial results, the study demonstrates how the constructivist grounded theory methodology can illuminate multiple truths and bring a focus on interpretive practices to the understanding of information management experiences.

This new approach offers holistic insights into academic information management phenomena as contextual, fluid and informed by meaning-making and adaptive practices. Limitations include the small sample size customary to qualitative research, within one situated perspective on the academic information management experience.

The study demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contributions of the constructivist information experience research to illuminate information management in an academic setting.

This paper aims to demonstrate the value of a collaborative research culture framework (Gasson and Bruce, 2018a), featuring trust and respect as core elements of healthy collaborations, to support the research success of higher degree research (HDR) students. HDR is a term used in Australia to reference Doctoral and Master by research programmes.

The authors propose that by positioning collaboration as part of a research culture built on trust and respect, discussion about and the development of healthy collaborative research culture will be facilitated. A healthy culture is defined as one that supports sustainable and productive collaborative research.

The applications of the framework demonstrate the role the framework can play in supporting researchers to understand, engage in and manage collaborations.

Reflection on discussions to date has led to the authors’ view that collaborative success requires a unique set of skills (i.e. skills in the development of a collaborative research culture) and that the framework provides a deliberate and overt way of supporting development of those skills.

The framework helps HDRs develop the capacity to build healthy collaborative research cultures vital for their research productivity and longer-term success as researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of skilled immigrants’ lived experience of using information to learn about their new setting.

Thematic analysis was conducted on a qualitative data set collected through 16 semi-structured interviews with newly arrived skilled immigrants in Australia.

The study uncovered six different themes of experiencing using information to learn among skilled immigrants. The themes, presented as a framework, explain skilled immigrants learn about their new life through: attending to shared stories by others; getting engaged; researching; comparing and contrasting past and present; being reflective; and being directly educated.

The study presents the theory-to-practice translation approach of “information experience design” that enables the enactment of theoretical understanding of information research.

The study invites, encourages and enables information professionals to take part in interdisciplinary conversations about integration of skilled immigrants in their host countries. Using the presented framework in the study, information professionals will be able to explain skilled immigrants’ learning about their new setting from an information lens. This provides information professionals an opportunity to work with immigration service stakeholders to help them incorporate the presented framework in their real-world practice and service. Such practice and services are of potential to support newly arrived skilled immigrants to become more information literate citizens of the host society who can participate more fully in their host society.

Australian higher education is presently subject to a period of substantial change. The needs of the economy and workforce, together with the broader educational role of the university, are leading to focus on lifelong learning as a tool for bringing together the apparently diverging needs of different groups. Within this broader context, the emphasis on lifelong learning and associated graduate capabilities is leading to opportunities for new partnerships between faculty and librarians, partnerships that bring the two groups together in ways that are helping to transform the experience of teaching and learning. This paper explores emerging partnerships in diverse areas, including research and scholarship, curriculum, policy, supervision, and staff development. They are in the early phases of development and result from a broad focus on the learning and information literacy needs of students, as opposed to a narrow focus on using the library and its information resources. Taken together, and viewed from a system‐wide perspective, these partnerships reveal a complex dynamic that is deserving of wider attention across the Australian higher education system and internationally.

As librarians have developed a growing concern for fostering the information literacy of library users they have become increasingly involved in teaching many facets of information use. Completing a literature review forms one important context within which people learn to use information effectively, and within this process the need to be able to think critically about the relevance of information is very important. One of the problems that neophyte researchers face in the early stages of their research, is the need to interpret the possible “scope” or “coverage” of their literature review. This article describes eight ways of thinking about scope identified among beginning research students: topicality, comprehensiveness, breadth, exclusion, relevance, currency, availability, and authority. Some of these eight concerns reflect recognised information values. They also suggest strategic directions for librarians and other educators working with beginning researchers. These directions include the need to help students adopt psychological rather than topical views of relevance, and subjective rather than objective views of information. Such strategies are likely to reduce students’ emphasis on comprehensive coverage, and would encourage them to focus on establishing connections and meaning in relation to their own research.

It has been at least twenty years since I was first alerted to the notion that my interest in a research topic arises from my unconscious. More recently, feminist theorists have developed the insight by arguing that integration of experience is helpful in defining research questions, as a source of data, to test findings and, in the words of Jean Bethke Elshtain, in assisting them to be less removed from the ‘wellsprings’ of their own ‘thought and action’. My aim in this article is to reconnect my experience with constructions of teachers in Australian children’s literature and to explore ways in which they are imagined in the literature. In my initial foray into this topic, I used Maurice Saxby’s historical review of Australian children’s literature as a guide for data gathering. This linear, chronological approach, while probably a helpful place to start, is not one I can sustain with any passion. In this article, I am returning to my experience to find a starting point, acknowledging that history is a ‘process of intellectual production as well as discovery’

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption of a phenomenographic conceptual framework to investigate learning from the perspective of the learner, with the aim of reflecting on the features that this approach shares with information literacy education in general, and with the relational model in particular.

The study offers an analysis of phenomenographic research on learning undertaken by Marton, which is further elaborated by examples of collaborative work by Marton and Booth, as well as by Fazey and Marton. The relationship between understanding and learning, promoted by this perspective, is explored in this paper to illustrate its impact on retention and transfer of the learning process. This is compared with the iterative and independent learning approaches promoted by information literacy education, and specific examples are used to illustrate the pedagogical overlap between phenomenography and information literacy. In addition, the paper examines the relational approach of information literacy promoted by the individual and collective works of Bruce, Lupton, and Edwards to demonstrate how the person‐world relation, advocated by phenomenography, is used to examine the learner‐information relationship promoted by the work of these authors.

The paper reflects on the potential impact that phenomenography and the relational perspectives have on pedagogical practices in Higher Education. In particular, it aims to demonstrate how the relational approach, together with the learn‐how‐to‐learn ethos of information literacy, is fundamental in promoting a framework for lifelong learning that leads to the empowering of the learner through an iterative cycle of reflection and practice, i.e. what phenomenography defines as variation in practice to foster the ownership of learning.

In line with the person‐world relation, the paper explores the relationship between learners and information by outlining its internal/subjective and external/objective dynamics. Claims that the learner's ability to reflect on these dynamics enhances his or her independent learning attitude are explored in the light of current phenomenographic and information literacy research.

This paper aims to explore the varying ways in which academic archivists in the USA experience archives, how these experiences compare to those of academic librarians and how we can use these findings to improve communication and collaboration.

Using a phenomenographic research approach, academic archivists were interviewed and the transcripts were examined to develop categories reflecting varying experiences.

There are three different ways of experiencing archives: as organizational records, as archival enterprise and as connection. The connection category is a more complex way of experiencing archives as it incorporates the aspects of the other two categories as well as the awareness of archives connecting people to their histories.

This study is limited to academic archivists in the USA.

Understanding that there are different ways of experiencing archives means that information professionals should clarify their definitions of before beginning collaborative projects. Also, by understanding these varying experiences, information professions should be able to communicate and engage more fully with each other and their users in projects and programs that leverage archival collections.

This is the first study to use phenomenography to investigate archivists’ experiences of archives. This understanding of the lived experience of archivists, combined with understanding how librarians experience archives, should enable better communication and ultimately collaboration between the two professions.

The purpose of this paper is to inform on results of the study based on the dissertation project – the study of newcoming university students and their information literacy experience. It describes the three categories of information literacy experience as perceived by these students.

The document is based on a qualitative phenomenographic study of 40 first-year undergraduate students of teacher education programs from five faculties of Comenius University in Bratislava. Data were collected from each participant in two stages by three methods: written statements, drawings and interviews.

The phenomenographic analysis results in three categories of information literacy: (1) the conception of digital technologies, (2) the conception of knowledge and (3) the conception of truth. The outcome space presented by two alternative models points to a strong interrelation of all three categories. The resulting conceptions point to the diversity of the concept of information literacy in relation to other types of literacies, especially digital, reading and media literacy, as well as to intersections with other scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science or philosophy.

The most important limits of this qualitative research are the low numbers of participants and the high degree of subjectivity in data evaluation. For this reason, a verification study was carried out one-year later.

Although phenomenographic studies of information literacy in the educational context are quite common, the third category of this study brings a new contribution to the information literacy theory – the dimension of truth or truthfulness of information.

Sources of information and other opportunities available via the Internet are increasing exponentially. This comes with the steady increase in Internet use for education, marketing and commercial trading, and in government for communication of information to citizens. Using the action research cycle of planning, acting, recording and reflecting, this article introduces a model for an approach to Internet searching and use. The model is a conceptual framework for Internet searching that will help people to overcome the challenges of working within an environment that is subject to continuous change, both in the forms of technology used and in the content that is available through the Internet. Our model encourages the searcher to use action research principles to enlighten their searching, reflecting and learning about new techniques as the tools that they use change around them. Our model should prove valuable to educators, researchers and consultants to inform their own practice as well as for use in the educational environment.