Dealing with Change Through Information Sculpting

How do we deal with challenging life events?

Working across hundreds of research studies, Dealing With Change Through Information Sculpting uncovers how people respond informationally to major life transitions by examining our information behaviours - how we provide, seek, assess, share, use, deny, avoid, and create information - during times of personal change and explains the role of these behaviours in reconstructing ourselves following a life event. Dealing With Change Through Information Sculpting proposes the theory of Information Sculpting to describe how we respond to change and the information behaviours we use to create this response, explaining how we construct solutions to life transitions by a series of information behaviours that are used to gain a sense of coherence, purpose, and value in life.

Until now there has been no text that provides an information focus on transitions across the human life span. Dealing With Change Through Information Sculpting looks at information behaviour in relationship creation and breakdown, parenting, starting and ending work, developing sexualities, becoming ill, being a victim of crime, and dying, to show how our we sculpt information solutions that transform our lives and transform ourselves. Supported by a bibliography of over 1,000 works, this book is a major reference point for those interested in how we use information during the most significant times in our lives.

Ian Ruthven is Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, UK, where he leads the Strathclyde iSchool Research Group. He is a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Pretoria and has won several awards for the quality of his research, including the Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award for major contributions to the field of Information Retrieval.