Abstract
We discuss here our observations of the interaction of bookshop customers with the books and with each other. Contrary to our initial expectations, customers do not necessarily engage in focused, joint information search, as observed in libraries, but rather the bookshop is treated as a social space similar to a cafe. Our results extend the known repertoire of collaborative behaviours, supporting further development of models of user tasks and goals. We compare our findings with previous work and discuss possible implications of our observations for the design of digital libraries as places of both information access and social interaction.
Keywords
- participant observation
- social space
- collaborative information behaviour
- book-based social networking
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Cunningham, S.J., Vanderschantz, N., Timpany, C., Hinze, A., Buchanan, G. (2013). Social Information Behaviour in Bookshops: Implications for Digital Libraries. In: Aalberg, T., Papatheodorou, C., Dobreva, M., Tsakonas, G., Farrugia, C.J. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8092. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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