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Introduction. This paper considers the practices of information creation in personal information management by studying the work of keeping track in everyday life, e.g., creating lists and calendars.Method. We interviewed ten participants from two Canadian provinces about how they keep track and we observed and photographed the physical spaces and the documents they created and used. Our data set consists of fourteen hours of interviews, 330 photographs and 500 pages of interview transcripts.Analysis. We used the qualitative technique of constant comparison within an abductive framework of relational and discourse analysis to study a) how the domestic work of keeping track hooks into the requirements of organizations such as schools and workplaces, and b) how talk about keeping track relates to participants' presentations of themselves as good workers, parents, citizens, etc.Results. The work of keeping track functions in terms of Dorothy Smith's concept of the ideological code. A managerial imperative pervades this work, even in domestic contexts, and participants made use of workplace genres and conventions.Conclusions. Even in households, the work of keeping track is embedded within organizational contexts. Managerialism is produced and reproduced as an ideological code that shapes participants' information creation and their talk about it.

This scoping literature review examines the topic of interdisciplinary doctoral research supervision. Interdisciplinary doctoral research programs are expanding in response to encouragement from funding agencies and enthusiasm from faculty and students. In an acknowledgement that the search for creative and innovative solutions to complex problems is best addressed through interdisciplinary collaborations, research-intensive universities are increasingly encouraging interdisciplinary projects and programs. The expansion of interdisciplinary research to the context of doctoral research may impact several core components of the doctorate: the enactment of the student–supervisor relationship, the process of forming and working with a supervisory committee, and the process and outcomes of doctoral research. In order to ensure that interdisciplinary doctoral supervision occurs in a positive and effective way, it is necessary to understand the distinct needs and challenges of interdisciplinary students and their supervisors, through scholarship about this phenomenon. Résumé Cet article retrace la recherche existante dans le domaine de l’interdisciplinarité ainsi que l’encadrement de recherches doctorales. Les programmes interdisciplinaires de recherches doctorales répondent à l’incitation des organismes de financement et à l’enthousiasme des professeurs et des étudiants et, de ce fait, deviennent de plus en plus nombreux. Les universités centrées sur la recherche encouragent la création de projets et de programmes interdisciplinaires, car elles sont convaincues que les solutions innovatrices et créatives aux problèmes complexes se réalisent par le truchement de collaborations interdisciplinaires. La demande croissante de recherche interdisciplinaire crée cependant un effet important sur plusieurs composantes centrales du doctorat : la mise en œuvre de la relation étudiantsuperviseur; le processus de formation et de travail du comité de supervision; et les processus et résultats de la recherche doctorale. Pour que l’encadrement doctoral interdisciplinaire se déroule de façon positive et efficace, il est donc nécessaire de comprendre clairement quels sont les différents besoins et défis des étudiants et de leurs superviseurs, en fonction du savoir déjà existant dans le domaine.

This paper examines the policy dimensions of user–generated content (UGC). It argues that policy–makers must create a policy environment that both balances both creator and end user’s rights and allows for the flourishing of UGC production and distribution because of both its economic and cultural value and ability to stimulate innovation. This paper emphasizes that UGC is an important creative outlet because it possesses either or both originality and transformativity. It discusses the multitude of means through which UGC generates value, serves as a medium for cultural expression and allows innovative activity. Despite the importance of UGC numerous barriers exist to inhibit its production including private ordering mechanisms such as licenses and technological protection measures and both major branches of intellectual property law (patents and copyrights). This paper reviews the current policy framework for UGC in the U.S., U.K., and E.U. before presenting a case study of the proposed UGC exception in Canadian copyright law. It concludes by discussing the how policy–makers can create a flourishing UGC environment and provides specific policy recommendations.

This paper reviews a wide range of scholarly and popular literature to provide an overview of the current state of online user–generated content (UGC). We describe the UGC value chain, introduce three varieties of content (creative content, small–scale tools, and collaboratively–created content), and describe the factors unique to each variety. We then identify the common elements across varieties: motivations for content creation, mechanisms to support content creation and control content quality, and value creation. Throughout the article we identify the interrelationships between social and commercial forces on UGC creation and distribution.

The goal of the Mobilizing User-Generated Content for Canada’s Digital Content Advantage project is to define User-Generated Content (UGC) in its current state, identify successful models built for UGC, and anticipate barriers and policy infrastructure needed to sustain a model to leverage the further development of UGC to Canada's advantage.This poster session is based on the report, Mobilizing User-Generated Content For Canada’s Digital Advantage (http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/21/) and is related to the Brown Bag presentation also presented on March 23, 2011 (http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspres/11/).

Introduction: This article analyses small or relational talk as a setting for exploring socially- and temporally-situated practices that constitute informing in a particular context. Method: Transcripts of forty clinic visits between Canadian midwives and childbearing women are analysed to show how relational talk is put together and what functions it performs. Analysis. Conversation analysis is used to show how speakers establish their entitlement to background knowledge and negotiate authority to speak on various topics. Results: Speakers display and deploy evidence of their developing relationship in and through their talk together. They situate talk about themselves and one another in the context of the relationship to work it up as news and to frame questions so that they are understood to address new or previously known concerns. They take up previous talk as informative and use it to make claims about one another. Through making arrangements they establish a single encounter as a member of a series and orient themselves to the past and future of the relationship. They call on their previous interactions as informative to the business at hand and present themselves as informed about the relationship and about the other(s) in that relationship. Conclusions: Small talk is a rich site for analysis. Considering an interaction as a situated member of a series rather than as an a-temporal snapshot allows for an analysis of the ways that the unfolding relationship itself becomes a resource for its members.

Several recent studies have analyzed users' descriptions of the reference transaction, but little research has analyzed library staff members' accounts of reference encounters. This article builds on the work of Marie Radford and the authors of the "library visit" studies by examining library staff members' descriptions of providing consumer health reference services. WE conclude that an in-depth study of staff members' accounts can provide insight into the different ways that library staff members and users construct problems in the reference encounter and can therefore suggest potential solutions.

Taking a discursive approach to information seeking research can allow researchers to move away from considering information seekers’ accounts as transparent and unproblematic representations their information behaviour or underlying cognitive and affective processes. This paper uses a constructivist discourse analytic approach to study the discursive functions performed by accounts of information seeking in a particular context – the ways that individuals use information-seeking stories to “position” themselves discursively. This paper analyses four modes of information practice (Active seeking, Active scanning, Everyday monitoring, Information seeking by proxy) present in participants’ accounts of connecting with information sources. Although the four modes represent varying levels of active engagement in information seeking, accounts of the four modes fulfilled the same discursive function of demonstrating the individual to be an autonomous actor, someone who is active, connected, attentive to the environment, alert to unexpected possibilities, and receptive to appropriate forms of information. Working from a constructivist discourse analytic approach allows the researcher to attend both to the characteristics of the information-seeking context (in this case, pregnancy) and to the researcher-participant interaction and the functions that accounts of information seeking perform within it. It is then possible to study the ways that accounts of information seeking may themselves take discursive action.

“Time,” like “information,” is a concept that has received a great deal of attention in some disciplines and is ignored or taken for granted in others. Traditional studies of information seeking have focussed on spatial issues – primarily, locating/ location of sources – to the neglect of temporal issues. This paper proposes that the social constructivist theoretical paradigm recently adopted by LIS researchers demands recognition of social time; that is, not absolute time, but another type of meaning constructed between people through their interactions. Attending to social concepts of time can have important implications for research into organizational and individual information behaviour. Information practices in organizations and work groups within organizations cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the multitude of times that exist within such groups. Studies of workplace information practices focus variously on organizations, project teams, task forces, crews, departments, etc. Each group has a different temporal existence based on its practices. For example, organizations, departments and communities imply longevity as well as duration. We describe a developing study of information practices in a limited-duration work group. Traditional studies of information seeking often consider individuals’ descriptions of their information seeking behaviour as transparent representations of underlying cognitive processes. A constructivist stance permits an analysis of the ways that accounts of information seeking can take discursive action: the ways that such accounts are structured and the ways they may be used to make claims about individuals’ general behaviour or competence, and to prescribe or proscribe certain sets of activities. The concept of “time” may then be used as a discursive resource by individuals in a social interaction. We report findings from a study of the ways that information seekers may use various representations of “time” in justifying certain kinds of information seeking behaviour.

This paper critically analyses representations of librarians, teachers and parents in texts pertaining to children's' literacy development.

We offer social positioning theory (Davies and Harre 1990) as a framework for exploring the ways in which the visibility of an individual’ s health status is linked to socially constructed subjectivities that can affect the individual’ s informationseeking behaviour. Qualitative analysis of data from two doctoral studies (collected through participant observation and 40 semi-structured interviews) illustrates the utility of social positioning theory as a framework for studying two specific health contexts: systematic lupus erythematosus, and twin pregnancy. Adopting a ‘ position’ involves the use of discursive practices which define the relations between self and others. Such practices frequently draw upon common social representations of particular phenomena (Van Langehove and Harre 1994). Our findings indicate that the visibility of health status is related to subject positioning, and that positioning theory offers insight into the mutually specifying correspondence between local discursive practices and styles of information behavior. The pregnant woman’ s expanding abdomen makes her health status evident to others, often positioning her as a willing recipient of advice and information (Browner and Press 1997). Cultural assumptions associated with “ twins” can both facilitate and constrain the woman’ s information seeking (“ Better you than me.” ). However, the stock of shared cultural understandings associated with lupus is comparatively sparse (Senecal 1991). Symptoms such as hair loss, skin rash, and weight gain may therefore lead to positions which are experienced by novice patients as stigmatizing (“ What’ s wrong with that woman?” ). Even when evident symptoms disappear, the stigmatized position can be maintained through secrecy (“ No one can tell I have lupus.” ). In these situations, information-seeking is relegated to the confidential encounters characteristic of expert disciplinary regimes. As a heuristic tool, then, positioning theory provides an opportunity for analysis of the means by which the information-seeking subject is configured through discursive encounters.