Opportunistic Discovery of Information and Millennials:An Exploratory Survey

摘要

Now that digital information can be accessed anywhere,there has been a resurgence of interest in informationencountering (IE) and the opportunistic discovery ofinformation (ODI). However, no studies have attemptedto distinguish between the task-oriented contextsassociated with IE and the more diffuse and variedsituations in which ODI occurs. The authors conducted asurvey (n=48) of undergraduate students between the agesof 18 and 25 in order to identify which mechanisms,formats, sources, and contexts provide them withopportunities for serendipitous information acquisition.Further, the survey was adopted to cover a variety of taskspecific(IE) and non-task specific scenarios (ODI). Theresults of this exploratory study confirm that both IE andODI seem to be common among this cohort, but themechanism of delivery and the format in which theinformation is presented impact the frequency ofoccurrences.