While information literacy training often focuses on searching for documents and sources [1], the author of this paper argues for a more holistic view. Through a large qualitative study involving more than 90 interviews on information behaviors in the Second Life virtual world, she draws attention to the importance of serendipity and information encountering.

Rather than focusing on a single framework or theory, the author investigates her data from a variety of viewpoints. She addresses Ellis et al.’s information seeking [2], Erdelez’s information encountering [3], and Mansourian et al.’s information visibility [4].

The analysis is particularly convincing in arguing that “information encountering” is an important tactic, not simply the result of serendipity. The paper reports on several particularly skilled subjects that adopted conscious strategies for information encountering, including using Twitter and randomly exploring the virtual world. These subjects also seemed to experience strong positive emotional benefits from experiences of information encountering.

I found the work very approachable. For Second Life enthusiasts, it provides a very comprehensible and self-contained introduction to the study of information-seeking behaviors. For librarians and educators, it provides a self-contained summary of Second Life’s key features, and demonstrates that the virtual world is not so different from the real one, when one considers the ways that humans seek information.