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Introduction
Scholars are in the business of assigning meaning to the numbers, letters, symbols, sounds, waves, images, and other bits of data that exist or are discovered, the “raw material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 1). Information is “data rendered meaningful” (Floridi, 2010; Ford, 2015, p. 11), making information both essential to, and the purpose of, faculty work. While the work that scholars engage in during the course of their research is broader and more complex than how they interact with or encounter information (Falciani-White, 2016; Palmer et al., 2009), gaining a better understanding of those information behaviors is a vital component of understanding research and academic practice. Information behaviors are frequently associated with information seeking and the scholarship element of the triad of teaching, scholarship, and service that comprises academic practice (Boyer, 1990). In reality, however, the ways in which faculty engage with information permeate every area of academic practice (Falciani-White, 2016), impacting how scholars decide to pursue a new research path, how they collect and analyze information related to that project, how they collaborate with other scholars to refine their ideas, and how they disseminate their work to others in the field.
While the vast literature that has been written on information behavior is not always consistent in how the term is defined, Fisher et al. (2005) believe that the majority of researchers who use the phrase espouse the definition of information behavior proposed by Wilson (2000) to be “the totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use” (p. 49). Fisher et al. (2005) build upon Wilson (2000) and Pettigrew et al. (2001), defining information behavior as “how people need, seek, manage, give, and use information in different contexts” (p. xix). Ford (2015) expands on these definitions by describing information behavior as engagement with any or all of the following: perceiving some information-related need, coming into contact with information potentially relevant to some need, assessing the suitability of information in relation to some information-related need, using information or knowledge, and organizing information for one’s own use, with a focus on the characteristics of the information in terms...