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The purpose of the study was to investigate the conduct of information operations in Kuwait. One of the top executives or managers from each of the 39 companies, which volunteered to participate in the study, was interviewed. Participant input was sought on a carefully designed questionnaire, containing 19 questions, covering the scatter of information operations. It was noted that most of these companies were engaged in a number of activities for determining user needs and collecting, organising, servicing, packaging, searching and retrieving information from formal and structured information sources. Against this backdrop, the absence of any information unit or professional was quite significant. Little activity was also noted in the use of Web technology and Internet utilities. Another finding, worthy of the attention of the policy makers, was related to little activity in the organisation, control and use of the internal information sources of these companies.

This study aims to explore young children’s information practices within the context of their individual interests, examining children’s interest-related information activities, challenges encountered and enablers received.

Participants included 18 children between five and seven years of age and their parents. Data were collected using a multi-stage participatory approach. Children shared their experiences via a book discussion, poster activity, participant-generated photography and a photo-elicitation interview. Parents provided information about family demographics and their perceptions of their children’s individual interests, information practices and digital media use via questionnaires. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method.

Young children seek information via print and digital objects, other people and experiences, and use information by applying it to their activities and sharing information with others. Challenges to information activities include children’s own capabilities and skills, constraints of information sources and parental restrictions on their activities. Enablers include affordances of technology and parental support.

This study takes a holistic approach to understanding young children’s perspectives of their information activities, examining information use and sharing activities in addition to information seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of wearable health and fitness trackers in everyday life, and users’ motivations and their understanding and use of the data derived from devices, and understand the results using the lens of information behaviours.

The study used a qualitative, constructionist approach, based on 21 interviews with users of a range of wearable activity trackers used for health and fitness.

Findings show that the lifelogging devices have become companion tools that enable users to take information from their bodily indicators and make some decisions about their health and fitness, and also track the results when they act on it, thus giving them a sense of gratification and a sense of control over their own health.

The findings have implications on how health professionals can talk to their lifelogging patients about how to deal with and understand the information provided by their activity-tracking devices. Some participants in the study already discuss these data regularly with their health professionals.

As the self-tracking practices attract wide range research interests from human–computer interaction, information systems, digital sociology, health informatics and marketing among others. This study provides important everyday information-seeking perspective that contributes to the understanding of the practices of how people make sense of the data, how the data improves their wellbeing, i.e. physical health improvement or fitness, and implications to users health behaviour. Additionally the study adds to the lifelogging literature through a constructionist, qualitative approach rather than a technological deterministic approach.

Many business process improvement efforts emphasize better integration, yet process integration can mean many things. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of information flows to modern business processes, and draw upon recent organizational and information systems literature to characterize process integration and to derive four principles of process integration: accessibility, timeliness, transparency, and granularity of information flows.

Using a field study, the four principles of process integration are applied to analyze ten different business processes across five organizations.

In total, 18 generalized activities are identified that describe non‐integrated behavior, and “keying in known data” was found to be the most common. Among other findings, analysis highlights the importance of documentation to modern business processes, especially for coordination roles, and the paper describes three different purposes for documentation found in the data: content, process validation, and posterity.

The articulation of “business process integration” offers a foundation for future research in this area. Findings are limited in generalizability to various levels of processes, as well as possible instrument‐related biases.

The principles of process integration provide a lens through which practitioners can analyze processes. Empirical findings stress the role of documentation, forms of documentation, and types of non‐integrated work.

The paper characterizes process integration in relation to other commonly‐used constructs such as organizational integration, data integration, and application integration. Principles are derived from the literature that can guide future inquiry and practice associated with business process improvement.

The purpose of this article is to investigate and critically examine conceptualisations of information sharing activities in a selection of library and information science (LIS) literature.

In order to explore how LIS researchers define the concept of information sharing, and how the concept is connected with theory, empirical material and other supporting concepts, a literature review and a conceptual meta‐analysis was carried out on 35 papers and one monograph. The analysis was based on Waismann's concept of open texture, Wittgenstein's notion of language games and the concept of meaning holism.

Six theoretical frameworks were identified. These are not found to be incommensurable, but can be used as building blocks for an integrative framework. Ambiguous conceptualisations are frequent. Different conceptualisations tend to emphasize different aspects of information sharing activities: that which is shared; those who are sharing; and the location in which the sharing activities take place. The commonalities of the people involved in information sharing activities are often seen as a ground for the development of information sharing practices.

The findings provide a guide for future research which intends to explore activities of information sharing.

The article offers a systematic review of recent LIS literature on information sharing, and extends the theoretical base for information sharing research.

This systematic literature review aims to elaborate the research progress of information practices to help other researchers attain a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of the field.

Following a systematic review protocol, 123 research articles from nine academic databases were included in the analysis.

Four separate results can be outlined. First, practice theory, social constructionist theory and activity theory are often used as the theoretical basis for the study of information practices. Second, people will engage in specific information practice activities in different external and internal contexts. The external contexts include social and needs contexts. The internal contexts include information source horizons, user's affection and user's cognition. Third, the existing information practice models can be divided into static and dynamic types. These models mainly reflected activities and influencing factors of information practices. Fourth, qualitative methods were the most used in information practice research.

The field of information practices is a vast, expanding research field. This research will focus only on a specific section, namely concepts, activities, contexts and models. Researchers could contribute to exploring the concepts, components and mechanisms of information practices by combining theories from various disciplines, such as sociology and behavioral science.

This is the first study to reveal the general picture of information practices. It also elaborates the characteristics of people's information practices and shows the potential development direction for future research.

The aim of this study is to further understanding of the situated activity of seeking pictures. It relates to an ongoing discussion on how multimodal information literacies are enacted in different social practices.

In order to understand the characteristics of the communication and interactions in the activity of seeking pictures, video recordings from an ethnographic study of primary school children working with problem‐centred assignments have been analysed.

The analysis reveals how the activity of seeking pictures is shaped by the assumption that pictures are different from facts and information; pictures are seen primarily as having decorative functions. The activity is also characterised by playful, yet efficient cooperation between the children; they make the activity meaningful by transforming it into a play and game activity where pictures become important as physical objects, but not as a semiotic means of learning.

The study is limited to the activity of seeking pictures in a specific primary school; however, it shows how modes other than textual modes can be included in the study of information activities.

The study reveals the need for developing methods for enhancing children's possibilities to critically examine and learn from visual material, such as pictures.

Research on information seeking and information literacies rarely focus on multimodal aspects of information activities or the seeking of pictures outside special collections, despite the increased significance of visual material in the contemporary media landscape. This paper shows how studies of multimodal information activities can be designed.

Activity‐based approaches, often referred to as activity‐based costing or activity‐based management, have recently gained attention as being useful tools for a better understanding of cost behaviour and cost control. Such approaches aim at providing accurate cost information in order to keep track of costs and to yield continuous improvement. Presents two case studies where activity‐based projects were run. The two firms studied represent two different objectives with the activity analysis, namely product costing and activity control. The characteristics of the activity information affect its usefulness, and in this article, activity information is subdivided into quantitative and qualitative information. Argues that it is important to have a clear objective with an activity‐based approach in order to gather the appropriate type of activity information and thereby exploit the potential improvement opportunities. Only quantitative activity information suffices for approaches aiming at costing, whereas approaches aiming at activity control require also qualitative activity information. The two case studies illustrate the significance of using the type of activity information that fits the purpose.

To provide some theoretical considerations concerning information literacy so as to contribute to a theoretically informed point of departure for understanding information literacy and to argue that to be an information literate person is to have knowledge about information sources and that searching and using them is determined by an insight into how knowledge is socially organized in society.

Using concepts from composition studies that deal with the question of what a writer needs to know in order to produce a text, the paper outlines some ideas and key concepts in order to show how these ideas and concepts are useful to our understanding of information literacy. To demonstrate how information‐literacy is to have knowledge about information sources and that searching and using them is determined by an insight into how knowledge is socially organized in society, the paper takes a point of departure in Habermas' theory of the public sphere.

Concludes that information seeking competence is a sociopolitical skill, like reading and writing skills, connected to human activity. Searching for documents in information systems is a complex and sociopolitical activity. As an expression of human activity we might say that searching for documents and reading and writing constitutes each other. The genre knowledge necessary in reading and writing does also apply when seeking information in systems of organized knowledge as the forms of information determine what can be expected and found in these systems. Information literacy covers, then, the ability to read society and its textually and genre‐mediated structures. Information literacy represents an understanding of society and its textual mediation.

Locating an understanding of information literacy in a broader discursive framework requires us to rethink our hitherto concepts and understandings of information literacy as socio‐political skills and not mere technical search skills

Rarely is information literacy discussed and understood from social‐theoretical perspectives. This article illuminates how an analysis of information literacy from the perspective of the theory of the public sphere can open up for an understanding of information literacy socio‐political skills. Thus, the article has contributed with a new interpretation of information literacy.

In the domain of information science, affordance is a relatively new concept that deserves further exploration. It may serve as a bridge to narrow the research-practice gap that has persisted in information studies. Building upon previous research, we call for a broader concept of affordance that would help researchers understand information practices from an ecological perspective.

The study focuses on conceptualizing affordances for information practices in order to theorize engagement among people, technology, and sociocultural environments. We develop a hierarchical model and a component model to illustrate how key tenets of affordances can be linked with the decomposition of activities and its mechanism. Following this, we describe an illustrative case of a popular Chinese cloud-based music platform to demonstrate the utility of our conceptual frameworks in guiding studies of information practices.

The study proposes to shift the focus of technology affordances, which highlights the features and functions of particular technologies, to the affordances for practices that are enacted through technology and social construction within a sociocultural environment. The illustrative case of the cloud-based music platform shows that the proposed models can provide a structured view of operations, actions and motives for music information practices. The processes of internalization and externalization offer insight into the decomposition of information practice as a chain of activity-action-operation.

This study contributes to the literature on theorizing engagement among people, technology and sociocultural environments through the theoretical lens of affordances and sheds new light on the challenges of information practice.