Review of: Theories of information behavior

Theoretically, information behaviour is one of the richest research areas in the field of library and information science (LIS). Since the calls for conceptual enrichment within the field of information behaviour in the post-1978 literature, which was emphasised in the Dervin and Nilan's seminal review chapter in ARIST (1986), much effort has been expended to generate new theories and develop new models of human information behaviour. There has also been a paradigm shift from focus on the system to focus on the user. During the sixties and seventies the focus of the studies was rather on the system and researchers tried to understand the users and their needs through the study of the system or the resources used. Since the paradigm shift researchers have paid more attention to the user and their characteristics. Different approaches have been adopted for the study of information behaviour of different user groups and new methodologies have been developed or adopted from other fields such as social sciences. However, most of the literature in this field of study has been scattered in research papers and book chapters. There has been a real need to bring the core of all this literature together in a monograph