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A hobby is any purposeful use of leisure time. Due in part to an increase in the amount of leisure time available to most Americans, the hobby and recreation industries have grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years. There are countless publications on hobbies ranging from genealogy to doll collecting, from painting to needlepoint. Obviously, a compilation such as this cannot include publications on every imaginable hobby, so rather than appear biased, this author has attempted to include primarily publications that discuss many different hobbies, or deal with one major group of hobbies.

The liberal arts hobby is a leisure pursuit that entails the systematic and fervent pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the liberal arts hobby as a setting for information behavior research.

The method of interdisciplinary translation work is used to relate existing research from the specialties of leisure studies, adult education, and information behavior. Drawing from leisure studies, the liberal arts hobby is presented within the context of the serious leisure perspective, a theoretical framework of leisure. Also, relevant research.

The basic informational features of the liberal arts hobby and adult learning project are discussed in terms of three issues of current interest within information behavior scholarship. The issues are: first, social metatheory and the ideal level of analysis; second, time and information behavior; and third, information behavior in pleasurable and profound contexts.

Research into everyday life, serious leisure and hobbies is extended and methodological tools are provided.

Information professionals, such as public librarians or systems designers, will have a better understanding of the information experience of a popular hobby group and be better able to meet their information needs.

Awareness and understanding of the liberal arts hobby will be increased across the field of information science, thereby creating a better alignment between the field and society.

The paper is the first to establish an interdisciplinary starting point for information behavior research in the liberal arts hobby.

While land management can be a subject of conflict in places where the composition of landowners is socially and culturally diverse, it also holds the potential of bringing landowners together across social groups. This chapter uses the case of a peri-urban area near Copenhagen, Denmark, to examine the relations landowners have through their use and management of land within and across social groups. To elaborate the analysis and discussion of social groups, social coherence and fragmentation, this chapter introduces the concepts of homophily and self-categorisation. Interviews with 40 landowners from two parishes addressed four types of land-based relations: (1) exchange of help and services; (2) debate of farming/management; (3) shared interests and (4) friendship. While the pattern of relations overall supported the idea that people interact more with their own social group, the analysis also showed areas of interaction across groups as well. Three overall themes summarise important areas of cohesion/fragmentation: (1) Rented land and contracting, (2) Common interests between landowners including hunting, farming and horses, (3) Urgency and geographic proximity.

This paper aims to describe the way participants in the hobby of gourmet cooking in the USA manage culinary information in their homes.

The study utilizes domain analysis and serious leisure as a conceptual framework and employs an ethnographic approach. In total 20 gourmet cooks in the USA were interviewed at home and then their culinary information collections were documented through a guided tour and photographic inventory. The resulting ethnographic record was analyzed using grounded theory and NVivo software.

The findings introduce the personal culinary library (PCL): a constellation of cooking‐related information resources and information structures in the home of the gourmet cook, and an associated set of upkeep activities that increase with the collection's size. PCLs are shown to vary in content, scale, distribution in space, and their role in the hobby. The personal libraries are characterized as small, medium or large and case studies of each extreme are presented. Larger PCLs are cast as a bibliographic pyramid distributed throughout the home in the form of a mother lode, zone, recipe collection, and binder.

Insights are provided into three areas: scientific ethnography as a methodology; a theory of documents in the hobby; and the changing role of information professionals given the increasing prevalence of home‐based information collections.

This project provides an original conceptual framework and research method for the study of information in personal spaces such as the home, and describes information phenomena in a popular, serious leisure, hobby setting.

The interest in scrapbooking across the USA has boomed virtually overnight. Sales have skyrocketed from $500 million in 2000 to $2.5 billion in 2003. Is the interest based on a great deal of scrapbooking hype and investment with little long‐term industry profitability, like the electronics “dot com” boom and bust? Or is there some other scenario developing here?

Data were developed from: a mail survey of 596 scrapbooking hobbyists; discussions with persons in the industry; and an extensive review of the available literature. The mailing yielded a surprising 30 percent return to a lengthy 58‐question instrument. All the respondents were subscribers to a scrapbooking magazine, possibly indicating persons highly involved with the hobby. The analysis focused on a better understanding of the long‐term viability of the scrapbooking market by addressing the questions posed above.

Scrapbooking respondents have a family‐oriented culture, are economically upscale, are well educated, and have an extensive communications network with others involved with the hobby. However, retail competition is intense and growing stronger as 4,000 independent scrapbooking stores struggle to compete against 15,000 well‐established large chains. Smaller stores are failing because of a lack of marketing and finance acumen. Those smaller operations that want to survive will have to cater to well‐defined niches.

The data suggest that the scrapbooking market might be losing some of its growth potential. The proportion of novices undertaking the hobby is declining, too many retailers are competing for a share of the market and the proportion of sale‐priced merchandise is increasing, because consumer tastes quickly change. Those in the industry need to be aware of the broader trends and develop contingency plans to survive in a turbulent market.

A recent industry study by Hartnett in 2004 shows that a very large proportion of businesspersons associated with scrapbooking are optimistic about the future business climate. This analysis indicates there may be some serious storms on the horizons.

The purpose of this study is to examine the choices social enterprises in the USA have about the legal formation of their business. Recently, new legal forms have been developed in the USA to ensure social goals are legally embedded into the firm. While the development of these new alternative supports social missions, organizations should be aware of both the benefits and drawbacks, which are outlined in this paper. Additionally, we draw on the US Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case to illustrate how social enterprises can embed their social mission into their legal foundation using traditional legal structures, accomplishing the same purpose as the new socially oriented alternatives.

The authors provide a detailed assessment of the social-oriented legal forms of business based on precedent set in the US Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case.

Based on precedent in the Hobby Lobby case, the authors’ view is that traditional US legal business structures can be as effective as alternative socially oriented legal forms in the US as a method to legally prevent mission drift by legally embedding social goals into the legal structure of the firm.

By highlighting how social enterprises can use traditional US legal business forms to ensure their social mission as part of the organizational goals, the authors provide another legal avenue, and so US-based social enterprises can continue to focus on addressing social issues without worrying about mission drift from legal pressures.

There is quite a lot of hype surrounding the development and adoption of socially oriented legal business forms in the USA with little discussion about the actual need for these new forms. The alternative perspective by the authors informs social enterprises how they can operate within the traditional US legal system while still focusing on their social mission.

The authors are one of the first to argue, based on precedent in the Hobby Lobby case, that US social enterprises need to critically examine which type of legal form is right for their business and what will offer them most benefit to their social mission in the long run.

This paper aims to report findings from a qualitative study about the information sharing patterns of beekeepers on online platforms.

The required data were collected from the publicly available user-generated content on popular beekeeping YouTube videos. Videos with high traffic were defined by the number of views, subscribers and comments. The sample includes 2,000 post-video comments, with the highest contribution in the discussions. The data were categorised through a deductive thematic analysis into ten categories, including information, advice, impression, opinion, responses, expression of personal feelings, general conversations, site processes, video content description and non-response comments.

The findings show that beekeepers are keen to share their experiences through public online platforms like YouTube and interact with fellow beekeepers and beekeeping enthusiasts. They share a range of beekeeping tips and techniques, varying from hive management and honey production to seasonal hive care and bee feeding. Sharing these practical hints helps them enhance their skills and learn from each other through tutorial videos or community engagement. Their willingness to share information generates a sense of support through online discussions and the formation of communities of practice.

The findings have practical implications for the stakeholders, including amateur beekeepers, beekeeping content creators and information professionals. Understanding the diverse engagement patterns can help YouTubers improve the quality of their videos and engage their audience. Also, information professionals can play various roles, such as curating special collections or local guides for beekeepers, facilitating workshops and promoting citizen science initiatives to help hobbyist beekeepers contribute relevant data to scientific research.

There is little research about the information behaviour patterns among beekeepers, and this paper contributes to this area by providing some empirical findings and attempts to fill the gap to some extent.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the affective aspect of information seeking is important in understanding information behaviour from a holistic perspective. While researchers have often explored adverse affective responses and coping mechanisms in information behaviour, this paper aims to focus on positive affect and the significant place of pleasure in amateur genealogists' information seeking and skills development.

This study adopted a multi‐case, exploratory approach to learning about amateur genealogists' affective behaviour associated with their information seeking. A total of 24 amateur genealogists from around the world participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews about their hunt for their Irish ancestors. Data were transcribed and analyzed to identify patterns of affective behaviour during genealogical information seeking.

The paper finds that amateur genealogists form a unique group of information seekers. Leisure functions as an important information seeking context, in which amateur genealogists associate information seeking with pleasure.

Findings suggest that there is a pleasure principle associated with information seeking, which may offer insight into patterns of affective information behaviour leading to advanced learning, information use, and technological adoption among older adults.

This paper reports findings from a research project about human information behaviour in the context of serious leisure. Various forms of information activities in this context have been identified and categorised to depict common patterns of information seeking, sharing, using and producing.

The project adopted a qualitative approach in an interpretive paradigm using a thematic analysis method. Data-collection technique was semi-structured interview and 20 volunteers were recruited via a maximum variation sampling strategy. The collected data was transcribed and thematically analysed to identify the main concepts and categories.

The participants have been experiencing six qualities of serious leisure during their long-term engagement with their hobbies or voluntary jobs and their experiences can be fully mapped onto the serious leisure perspective. The findings also confirmed serious leisure is a unique context in terms of the diversity of information activities embedded into a wide range of individual and collective actions in this context. Information seeking and sharing in serious leisure is not only a source of personal satisfaction for the participants, it also can provide them with a sense of purpose in a meaningful journey towards self-actualization and social inclusion.

The generalisability of the findings needs to be examined in wider populations. Nonetheless, the existing findings can be useful for follow-up research in the area.

This study will be useful in both policy and practice levels. In the policy level, it will be beneficial for cultural policy makers to gain a better understanding about the nature of leisure activities. In the practice level, it will be helpful for serious leisure participants to understand the value of information seeking and sharing in their leisure endeavours. Also, information professionals can use it to enhance the quality of their services for the serious leisure participants who are usually among devoted patrons of libraries, museums, archives and galleries.

Learning about serious leisure can provide new insights on people preferences in terms of choosing different entertaining and recreational pursuits – such as indoor and outdoor hobbies – in their free time.

The informational aspects of serious leisure is an emerging and evolving ground of research. This paper provides empirical evidence on this topic from a specific context in the regional areas in Australia.