LAUSR

Information behavior, and more recently information practices, together are an important area of information science. Significant scholarly work occurs on these topics around the world, which is presented at the major scholarly conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and also the biennial ISIC conference, which focuses on research in these areas. Indeed, the largest special interest group in ASIS&T remains Needs, Seeking, and Use (SIG-USE), which is focused on information behavior and practices. One of the enduring challenges in this area is ensuring that this scholarship is appropriately informed by theory from within information science but also across the social sciences and humanities. However, there are several challenges to the development and application of theory in the field(s) of information behavior and information practices. While there is a long and rich tradition of creating models and frameworks in information behavior (e.g., Case & Given, 2016; Ellis, 1993; Godbold, 2006; McKenzie, 2003; Wilson, 1999), this has not been the case with the development of theories. This is not to say that that theoretical work has not happened, as evidenced by work such as Chatman (1999), Dervin (1998), Savolainen (2008), as well as the collection of theories published in the book Theories of Information Behavior (Fisher et al., 2005). However, criticism remains that there is a lack of cohesive theory and/or that theory borrowed from other fields may be treated in shallow ways. Deficiency in theoretical development has contributed to a lack of shared definition and boundaries of the field, evident in the split between information behavior and information practices research (e.g., Savolainen & Wilson, 2009). As a relatively young field—originating in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Ellis, 2011)—an important step in the evolution of information behavior and information practices is the continued development of its own theory, as well as the systematic incorporation of relevant theories from related fields. This special issue was conceived as a continuation and extension of the work begun in Theories of Information Behavior (Fisher et al., 2005), a book composed of the contributions from the participants of the 2003 ASIS&T SIG-USE Symposium. Continuing the work with SIG-USE 15 years later, the 2020 SIG-USE Symposium was on the theme of the special issue and provided authors an opportunity to develop their ideas and receive feedback on their papers. The call for papers for this special issue asked for submissions examining the following: