Chapter 6: Reviewing, Critiquing, Concluding, and Futuring

This book has described the many ways people experience information and how those experiences have been studied. We will first review, briefly, some key highlights and then comment on the changing emphasis of information behavior research. We will end by discussing some recent and future trends.

Chapter 1 defined the overarching concepts of behavior, practices and experiences, and their underlying elements (such as seeking, needs, use, and encountering). We contrasted older, system- and person-oriented approaches to research with the “person-in-context” frame for studying information behavior that has become ubiquitous in contemporary scholarship. Our purpose as information behavior scholars now is to emphasize the holistic and context-driven nature of people's information experiences.