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This article examines the relation between place, space and information behaviour.

Concepts of place and space are explored through a comparison of three leisure pursuits: running, urban exploration and genealogy, based on the authors' research and the published literature.

A socially constructed meaning of place is central to each leisure activity but how it is experienced physically, emotionally and imaginatively are different. Places have very different meanings within each practice. Mirroring this, information behaviours are also very different: such as the sources used, the type of information created and how it is shared or not shared. Information behaviour contributes to the meanings associated with place in particular social practices.

Meaning attached to place can be understood as actively constructed within social practices. Rather than context for information behaviours in the sense of an outside, containing, even constraining, environment, the meaning of place can be seen as actively constructed within social practices and by the information behaviours that are part of them.

The paper adds a new perspective to the understanding of place and space in the study of information behaviour.

An increasing amount of research and debate has emerged over the last few years, emphasising the need for developing digitally competent, literate, able, skilled, capable people within a constantly changing technological and online environment. Existing definitions and perspectives in this area go beyond the use of technological tools or media for the creation of a digital literacy mindset, which develops throughout one's life. However, Higher Education strategies have not yet caught up with this agenda.

A student survey with Library and Information Science students from three higher education institutions in Scotland, Ireland and Greece was conducted as a basis of empirical data to support the theoretical propositions of the study. The survey centred on the technical and higher-level digital competences of students and drawing from students' self-perceived digital competences for learning and for the everyday life digital context, addressing e-leisure, e-learning, e-democracy, e-government and e-health activities. The survey critically enabled students to assess digital competences from their perspectives as digital participants.

Students' self-assessment of digital competences were lacking in a number of areas, which involved the development of information literacy, digital creation, digital research and digital identity management. In addition, students' digital competences were found to be linked to previous experiences within the everyday life digital environment. The higher the self-perceived digital competence levels of students were on the basis of dealing with everyday life digital tasks, the more likely they were to also develop high self-perceived digital competence in other digital areas related to their education.

Higher education has not fully embraced digital competences as a core, fundamental literacy which addresses both technology mastery and a digital citizenship mindset. As emerging models begin to challenge traditional teaching and learning paradigms, with global connectivity and personalised approaches, existing digital divides may be further accelerated. This requires revisiting digital competences with emphasis on the diversity of the contexts where it develops and of the learners involved, in the overall continuum of learning for life.

Teaching and learning online during the Covid-19 pandemic has forced university instructors to consider online alternatives to the classroom. It is possible to facilitate students’ learning in the digital environment in similar ways to the traditional face-to-face classroom. The inclusion of e-guests in the digital learning space presents one such opportunity. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of e-guests in online learning.

This paper presents a case study, following a postgraduate class and the role of the e-guest in students’ synchronous online learning.

E-guests facilitated student learning. Their approaches to learning ranged from slides to discussions. Students responded well to this method of learning.

There is potential for enhancing student learning through the inclusion of e-guests, who bring their expertise to the classroom. E-guests from different regions offer students an opportunity to learn from specialists they would not necessarily have access to in the traditional classroom.

E-guests offer one important potential means of enriching online teaching.

Provides the foundation for work accomplished by information professionals. As telework, or working regularly from home using telecommunications technology, is increasingly adopted in the workplace, employees are challenged to maintain the same level of connectivity in their network of information sources. Teleworkers experience a variety of changes in their work situations, as not only is their physical work location altered, but also their means of working changes. Examines ways in which library and information science professionals can facilitate teleworkers’ information access. The information environments of 20 teleworkers and 20 at‐office information professionals with similar jobs are discussed. Researchers have predicted a restructuring of organizations and of information into electronic formats to accommodate work done from home results and reveal that teleworkers still relied heavily on print sources of information. Teleworkers adopted specific strategies for ensuring availability of information in their at‐home work environments, including asking colleagues to send information to them at home. Suggests that library and information science professionals have a vital role to play in teleworkers’ interaction with information. Ways of training library and information science professionals are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the affective aspect of information seeking is important in understanding information behaviour from a holistic perspective. While researchers have often explored adverse affective responses and coping mechanisms in information behaviour, this paper aims to focus on positive affect and the significant place of pleasure in amateur genealogists' information seeking and skills development.

This study adopted a multi‐case, exploratory approach to learning about amateur genealogists' affective behaviour associated with their information seeking. A total of 24 amateur genealogists from around the world participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews about their hunt for their Irish ancestors. Data were transcribed and analyzed to identify patterns of affective behaviour during genealogical information seeking.

The paper finds that amateur genealogists form a unique group of information seekers. Leisure functions as an important information seeking context, in which amateur genealogists associate information seeking with pleasure.

Findings suggest that there is a pleasure principle associated with information seeking, which may offer insight into patterns of affective information behaviour leading to advanced learning, information use, and technological adoption among older adults.

The purpose of this paper is to explore graduate students’ behaviour and perspectives regarding personal digital document management, as well as insights into the connections between memory and document re-finding.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 graduate students studying information and library science. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were analysed using open and axial coding.

Participants were overall positive about the importance of managing their digital documents but they had little knowledge about currently available personal information management (PIM) tools. Characteristics of digital documents frequently used by participants to re-find documents include name, subject, storage location, creation time, keyword, document title, document file type, user’s location and recency. For participants the act of organizing documents is itself a memory aid. Participants’ recommendations for PIM tools include support for information organization and simplistic visualizations that can be customized, e.g., using colour to highlight folders or documents.

The number of study participants was relatively small, and further studies should examine a more diverse participant sample, e.g., to investigate whether tasks influence re-finding. Further studies should also examine PIM with respect to other types of devices and services, including tablets and cloud services.

The results include recommendations for future PIM tool design.

This research identifies documents’ characteristics that participants use to re-find documents and the importance of these characteristics. It also examines the usage and expectations of PIM tools in everyday PIM.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which social networking tools had an impact on academics’ patterns of informal scholarly communication in humanities and social science disciplines. Social networking tools, reinforced by proliferation and advances in portable computing and wireless technologies, have reshaped how information is produced, communicated and consumed.

A cross-institutional quantitative study utilized an online questionnaire survey sent to 382 academics affiliated with humanities and social science disciplines in two different academic institutions: one that belongs to a Western tradition of scholarly communication in Ireland, and the other to a developing country in Oman. Descriptive interpretation of data compared findings from both universities. Frequencies, percentages and means were displayed in tables to enhance the meaning of collected data. Inferential analysis was also conducted to determine statistical significance.

Overall findings indicate progressive use of social networking tools for informal scholarly communication. There is perceived usefulness on the impact of social networking tools on patterns of informal scholarly communication. However, nearly one-third of the respondents have never used social networking tools for informal scholarly communication. Institution-based data comparison revealed no significant differences on data except for few activities of informal scholarly communication.

Given that the number of study subjects was eventually small (total = 382) and that academics by their very nature are disinclined to respond to online surveys, results of the study may suggest non-response errors, and these may impact negatively on the acceptability of inferences and statistical conclusions. The results of the study are, therefore, unlikely to be useful for generalization, but they remain suggestive of a growing tendency among humanities and social sciences’ academics to use social networking tools for informal scholarly communication.

Empirical findings provide a broad understanding about the potential of social networking tools on informal scholarly communication in areas of humanities and social sciences disciplines. Multi-disciplinary investigation and qualitative studies may further deepen our understanding of the impact of social networking tools on patterns of scholarly communication.