Making and taking information

Abstract

Information behavior theory covers different aspects of the totality of information-related human behavior rather unevenly. The transitions or trading zones between different types of information activities have remained perhaps especially under-theorized. This article interrogates and expands a conceptual apparatus of information making and information taking as a pair of substantial concepts for explaining, in part, the mobility of information in terms of doing that unfolds as a process of becoming rather than of being, and in part, what is happening when information comes into being and when something is taken up for use as information. Besides providing an apparatus to describe the nexus of information provision and acquisition, a closer consideration of the parallel doings opens opportunities to enrich the inquiry of the conditions and practice of information seeking, appropriation, discovery, and retrieval as modes taking, and learning and information use as its posterities.