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Although tourist experience has been considerably studied, there is a dearth of research on spiritual cognitive stages in tourism literature. Therefore, this paper aims to reveal the dimensions of the tourist experience based on numinosity context.

A qualitative method is used by the etic and emic approach with an ethnographic background. After observation and active participation in the field, data was collected from 44 participants with semi-structured interviews to reveal their numinous experiences dimensions.

The results show that numinous experience in three categories (mysterium, tremendum and fascinans) can be evaluated in seven dimensions including history, story, awe, reverence, atmosphere, place-based and nature-based dimensions.

This study provides managerial and practical implications for tourism stakeholders to be aware of numinous experiences and to better manage sacred places.

This paper offers a novel tourist experience design in the numinous context to the best of the authors’ knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that libraries do not inevitably arise from the aggregation of information, and to apply this result to critique the meaningfulness of the idea of a “digital library.”

Three independent arguments demonstrate that libraries are more than the sum of the books that they contain: first, the logical argument, which analyses the internal consistency of claims for the superiority of electronic formats; second, the semantic argument, which examines ordinary language to isolate the core requirements of what it means to be a “library”; and third, the ethical argument, which identifies the source of the unique phenomenological experience of encounter with the library.

It is found that the three arguments each refute the view that “library” is the collective noun for “book,” and argue instead that it is an emergent concept that offers to its community a reflection of the local cultural knowledge through the ordinary selection and organization practices that distinguish libraries from other book accumulations. Against that understanding the idea of a comprehensive and universal digital library fails on the essential criteria of selectivity and organization. While such products can be powerfully useful, they offer something distinct from libraries. When we lose sight of this difference we risk losing the inherent and irreducible values embodied by libraries.

The paper's arguments provide a reasoned infrastructure to several beliefs that are both common and unexamined.

Marketing‐driven consumer culture is often indicted in the degradation of the ecosphere. Futurists envision an ecological crisis in the new millennium. Marketing and consumer research can be enlisted in the aversion of this crisis. Political and philosophical regimes of environmental reclamation and redemption must be mobilized by conversion experiences in the individual’s soul. In this paper, I propose that marketers instigate millenarian activities to trigger a revitalization movement in the service of ecotheology. Such a provocative enterprise is well suited to the discipline’s posture of eminent domain at century’s end. I offer some suggestions for the shape that such a revitalization might take.

The purpose of this paper is to invite further consideration of how people experience documents. By offering a model from Reader Response theory – Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading – as well as examples from research on numinous experiences with museum objects, the author hopes to open further avenues of information behavior studies about people and documents. The goal is to incorporate more aspects of lived experience and the aesthetic into practice with and research of documents.

Theoretical scope includes Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Reading, John Dewey's concepts of transaction and experience and lived experience concepts/methods derived from phenomenology.

Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory explicates the continuum of reader response, from the efferent to the aesthetic, stating that the act of “reading” (experience) involves a transaction between the reader (person) and the text (document). Each transaction is a unique experience in which the reader and text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. This theory of reading translates well into the realm of investigating the lived experience of documents and in that context, a concrete example and suggested strategies for future study are provided.

This paper provides a holistic approach to understanding lived experience with documents and introduces the concept of person-document transaction. It inserts the wider notion of document into a more specific theory of reading, expanding its use beyond the borders of text, print and literature. By providing an example of real document experiences and applying Rosenblatt's continuum, the value of this paper is in opening new avenues for information behavior inquiries.

Through observing the use of iPhone and iPad by a child between the ages of two and four years and a half, this study presents accounts on the child’s use of and interaction with these devices, as well as her interaction with the physical environment.

Unstructured, naturalistic observation was employed in this study. The study is grounded in theories of user engagement with digital and physical objects.

A child’s interaction with touch-based devices does not deter the child from engaging effectively with the physical environment or from activities centered on creativity and interpersonal engagement. A child is able to move back and forth seamlessly between the physical and digital environments.

Findings from this study could help parents, educators, and system designers understand why and how toddlers and preschoolers use and engage with touch-based devices, as well as the kind of tasks they perform.

Studies of toddlers’ or preschoolers’ information behavior and interaction with touch-based devices are scarce. Children born toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century are growing up with a propensity to using touch-based devices. This study provides a framework for effective usage of such devices while ensuring all-round cognitive and physical development of the child.

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.

This paper aims to demonstrate the confluence of thinking across several areas, in their critique of modernity, with potential solutions in the mental health field.

The paper uses case and organisational examples related to relevant theory and clinical practice to demonstrate relevant contradictions and paradoxes in “modernised” mental health care. This is based on the author's experience as a public sector psychiatrist specialising in “personality disorder” to lead a government programme of new service developments in the field.

Modern methods of management, focusing on measurement, prediction and control – in the service of efficiency and economy – are not sufficient to meet the needs of a population with high incidence of “personality disorder”. A major change of attitude is required, to an authentic biopsychosocial approach, including spiritual and other non‐verbal considerations.

Hitherto, research has not combined these elements in a way that has made it easy to capture and analyse them. New methodologies and paradigms may be called for.

Mental health care should not be considered an entirely rational process that can be measured and manualised; considerations of how to better manage complexity and uncertainty are urgently needed.

Destigmatisation and normalisation of mental distress and “illness” should occur.

The paper introduces two new terms to mental health discourse: “greencare” and “biopsychosocialism”.

The purpose of this article is to understand the meaning of museum objects from an information perspective. Links are made from Buckland's conceptual information framework as a semiotic to museum object as “document” and finally to user experience of these museum “documents”. The aim is to provide a new lens through which museum studies researchers can understand museum objects and for LIS researchers to accept museum objects as another form of document to be studied.

A conceptual and comparative analysis of Buckland's information typology as a semiotic. Outcome of analysis forms a model of understanding the museum object as a “document” that is accessed by users on a continuum of experience.

Michael Buckland's information typology is insightful and useful for a broad understanding of what all heritage institutions have in common: the physical object. Buckland helps us see the museum as an information system, the museum object as a document, and the multidimensional use of the concept information and its semiotic ramifications.

Buckland's typology is important to an understanding of the museum system and museum object in both LIS and museum studies. The concept of “document” opens up a broader perspective, which creates, rather than limits understandings of the human relationship with information. This expanded concept of “document” as sign/semiotic helps us understand user experience in ways not previously explored in the convergence of museums and information studies, from the practical to the theoretical. In this inclusive sense, Buckland's concept of document is a unifying theoretical concept for museums, libraries, and archives.