ISIC 2014 - Information Seeking in Context : The Information Behaviour Conference

The field of human information behaviour and practice is multi-disciplinary in scope: researchers from information science, information management, management science, psychology, social psychology, sociology, information systems, computer science, and other disciplines all contribute to this field of investigation.
ISIC: the Information Behaviour Conference intends to reflect this interdisciplinary character through attracting papers from researchers in all of these areas. The issues of common interest include the relationship between the needs or requirements of the information user, the means for the satisfaction of those needs and the uses to which those means are put in practice by organizations or disciplines. Thus, papers that deal solely with technological aspects of system design, for example, will not be appropriate for the conference.
Themes of the conference include the following:
Theories and models of information behaviour and information practice, including conceptualizations of the cognitive, affective, social and situational aspects of information needs, seeking, searching, use and sharing.
Research approaches and methodologies, both interpretative and positivist, employing either qualitative or quantitative methods.
Information behaviour and information practices in specific contexts: e.g., in different sectors and organisations (health care, education, business, industry, the public services and government, the emergency services); in everyday life, and in virtual social networks (including social media, gaming and virtual worlds as arenas for information exchange).
Collaborative information practices: communities, boundary spanning and innovation practices.
Information use and value: the nature of information and how information is used to help solve problems, aid or support decision making
Information behaviour and analytics (social media and enterprise analytics).
Organisational structures and processes and information behaviour and practices.
The role of information in building and enhancing the adaptive capacity of organisations: strategy and information absorption, transformation and integration.
The mediation of information behaviour: how human or software agents can respond to information needs.
The design of information delivery systems to meet information needs generally, or in organizational or disciplinary contexts, including social media and Web 2.0 developments such as blogs, wikis, e-learning platforms and open access information resources.
The communication of information to users: relationship between communication theory and information behaviour, including, for example, the relationship of information architectures to information seeking behaviour and the design of information products based on sound communication principles.
Cross-disciplinary contributions: integrating studies on information seeking and interactive retrieval; integrating information science, management science and information systems.
For this forthcoming conference we are particular eager to see research papers engaged with virtual communities as well as communities that are currently under-represented or considered marginal (socially and/or culturally). Also, analytical, rather than descriptive investigations, will be sought, with strong connections to previous work and to theoretical or conceptual frameworks.
Important Dates
Paper and poster preparation and submission deadline is January 10, 2014.
Paper Format
The maximum length of a paper is 5500 words. Paper presentation format in the conference includes full presentations (30 minutes) and short presentations (20 minutes).