Investigation of information encountering in the controlled research environment
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Mobile Social Software: Facilitating Serendipity or Encouraging Homogeneity?
IEEE Pervasive Computing
Chance encounters in the digital library
ECDL'09 Proceedings of the 13th European conference on Research and advanced technology for digital libraries
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Serendipity has received much attention from library and information science, psychology, and computer science. Yet not much is known about serendipity in the context of everyday information behavior. In general, a key challenge in the study of serendipity is obtaining accounts of serendipitous experiences that provide insight into the phenomenon. The exploratory research reported here approaches this problem by examining naturally occurring descriptions of serendipity as found on blogs. The paper shows how these data can be collected, stored, and analyzed. We also discuss strengths of the proposed approach in comparison to the use of descriptions elicited in controlled settings for the purposes of research. Through a grounded theory approach, we develop a model of serendipity that can inform the design of information systems. The paper contributes to the LIS field by discussing an alternative data collection method for serendipity research, outlining a tentative conceptual model of serendipity, and showing the utility of this model for the analysis of everyday accounts of serendipity found on blogs.