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Information we receive from and create together with our social networks is becoming increasingly important. Social information has in many ways a great impact on our information behaviour and there are many possible angles and layers in studying social aspects in information science. This book presents some of these angles. This book is relevant for various actors in the library and information science field and will be useful for researchers, educators and practitioners while coordinating empirical research on social information and by providing an overview of some of the present research about social information.

The purpose of this book is to collect current research representing different aspects of social information with emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior. To begin with, we need to define what we mean by social information in general and in the area of information science in particular. It is interesting to notice that social information is a concept used and researched in many different disciplines. Besides information science, the concept of social information has been studied in biology, psychology, and sociology among other disciplines.

It is clear that a lot of information acquisition happens through networks and therefore the focus in this article will lie in the relationships that bind a network together. The attempt is to map the motives as well as the group identity factors as means of exploring the reasons for sharing. The theoretical framework is brought from the social capital and group identity literature combined with the theories on information sharing in context. The aim is to see how information-sharing practices are developed in two different organisations and these theories are mirrored in the information sharing practices in an insurance company and in a biotechnology firm. The analysis of the cases shows how the group identity and the local context affect information sharing practices. The human and social processes underpin the formal structures enabling information interactions.

Marit Kristine Ådland is a Ph.D. student at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science. Her research interests and activity is within knowledge organization, information behavior, information retrieval, and information architecture. Her current research explores users’ tags and tagging behavior in the field of cancer information. She teaches classification and indexing to students training in librarianship.