Information experience as an object of LIS research: a definition based on concept analysis
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2021-0195 |
| Published date | 09 March 2022 |
| Date | 09 March 2022 |
| Pages | 1487-1508 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Liangzhi Yu,Yijun Liu |
Information experience as an
object of LIS research: a definition
based on concept analysis
Liangzhi Yu and Yijun Liu
Department of Information Resource Management, The Business School,
Nankai University, Tianjin, China
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to contribute to the clarification of core concepts in information experience
research and to the consolidation of information experience as a distinctive research object.
Design/methodology/approach –This study adopts a series of techniques from Wilson’s toolkit of concept
analysis.
Findings –This study finds that there exist tensions between different uses of the term information
experience, giving rise to two fundamentally different conceptions of this particular human experience which
this study names, respectively, the posterior conception and the a priori conception. It also finds that it is
linguistically more useful, practically more consonant with LIS’s concerns and unitarily more consistent to
define information experience following the a priori conception. It postulates that information experience can
be defined as a person’s subjective, pre-reflective living through of his/her life as an information user in the
information sphere of the lifeworld.
Research limitations/implications –If adopted by future research, the concept proposed in this study is
likely to push information experience research toward a more prominent phenomenological turn on the one
hand, and a return to conventional LIS concerns on the other.
Practical implications –The clarified concept may help user experience librarians and system designers to
see the relevance of information experience research for their work more clearly.
Originality/value –By identifying, comparing and discussing different existing uses of information
experience, and by suggesting a redefinition of the concept, this study has brought the core concepts of
information experience research to a new level of clarity, and has verified information experience as a
distinctive object for LIS research.
Keywords Information behavior, Information experience, Concept of information, Phenomenology, User
experience, Concept analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Starting from the late 1990s, a rising interest in studying human information experience has
emerged in library and information science (LIS). The earliest endeavor appeared in the field
of information literacy research, where Bruce (1997,1998,1999) led an approach to studying
information literacy by examining users’experience of information use, following a
methodology known as phenomenography. Later, a different strand of research surfaced
from the philosophical foundation of phenomenology. Drawing on thoughts of eminent
phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, etc., this strand
aims to examine people’s experience of being informed in specific contexts. There is a clear
awareness among both strands that they are examining a research object that is subsumable
to neither information behavior nor information practice. This led them to explicitly conceive
Information
experience as
an object of LIS
research
1487
This study is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71974103). The
authors would like to thank Professor Yuxiang Chris Zhao of Nanjing University of Science and
Technology for reading the draft of this paper and for his inspiring comments. They would also like to
thank the two anonymous referees for their very critical and insightful review which inspired
substantial revision of the manuscript.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 2 October 2021
Revised 16 February 2022
Accepted 23 February 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 6, 2022
pp. 1487-1508
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-10-2021-0195
related research as a distinct domain within LIS (Partridge and Yates, 2014). In 2014, an
anthology focusing on information experience was published (Bruce et al., 2014a); in 2018,
two issues of Library Trends were devoted to information-related carnal experience; and in
2020, a monograph (Gorichanaz, 2020) and a review article (Savolainen, 2020) were published.
By the end of the second decade of this century, the body of information experience research
had become so noticeable that it can be argued that a domain as conceived by Partridge and
Yates (2014) has taken shape, contributing, in its own way, to LIS’s understanding of
information users.
A number of technological and intellectual changes may have stimulated LIS’s interest in
information experience. Technologically, new information and communication technologies,
with their participative and multisensory media and interfaces (Robinson, 2015), have greatly
enriched people’s experience during their interactions with information and information
systems. Against this background, information system and service design have increasingly
aimed at making people more satisfied, comfortable, confident and happier in addition to
making them more productive (Cox, 2019;Thompson and Rees, 2021), generating a notable
need among system designers and service providers to be informed of people’s experience
during information access. This, in turn, instigates a rising cross-disciplinary interest in
examining the experiential dimension of user-information interactions. Concurrent with the
emergence of the novel information experience research, scholars of information behavior,
human–computer interaction and library services have also begun related inquiries under the
topic of user experience.
Intellectually, LIS began to take in the influence of experience-accentuating philosophies,
most notably phenomenology, at the turn of the century (Budd, 2005;Savolainen, 2008;
Wilson, 2002). Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical schools of the
twentieth century. It centralizes human experience in both its epistemological and ontological
investigations but, unlike traditional empiricism which sees experience as a sensory
collection of images of the world reducible to knowledge in the forms of concepts, models,
laws, etc., it sees experience as pre-reflective living through of one’s existence in the world (i.e.
lived experience), able to reveal things themselves (Van Manen, 2014). Phenomenology is
therefore against positivism and reductionism in studying human experience. When applied
to LIS, such an intellectual stance practically preordains people’s lived information
experience as an object for research.
Simultaneous to LIS responding positively to the influence of phenomenology, or perhaps
as a result of this response, a number of LIS scholars began to reflect upon the epistemological
value of information and information access, arguing that their value lies not so much in
facilitating knowledge about the world as in enabling understanding of it (Bawden and
Robinson, 2016;Gorichanaz, 2017,2020). As Gorichanaz (2017) comments, while knowledge is
conventionally deemed as fact-based, understanding can also arise from aesthetic and
affective experience such as feelings, intuitions, imaginations, etc. The question of how
information and LIS contribute to understanding mandates that LIS expands its user-related
inquiries to cover not only information behavior/practice but also information experience,
including interest/hobby-related ones (Kari and Hartel, 2007).
Notwithstanding the growing interest in this emerging research, the concept of
information experience has remained regrettably ambiguous. As the literature review
section will show in greater detail, while explicit definitions define information experience
as people’s holistic engagement with information in specific contexts, implicit
understandings characterize it as experience of anything informative. The former (the
explicit definitions) seems to have resulted in a denotation rather indistinguishable from
the multifaceted conceptions of information behavior and information practice (e.g.
Kuhlthau, 1991;Lloyd, 2009), the latter appears to have given rise to a connotation unable to
exclude any experience in any contexts from information experience. Such ambiguities
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