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This is part II of on‐going research, the purpose being to establish a creative information‐seeking model.

Two studies were conducted to examine the subjects' creative information seeking behaviours and the extent to which they exhibited the proposed stages in creative information seeking when accomplishing a directed and an open‐ended information‐seeking task respectively.

Findings seemed to indicate that all the subjects underwent the proposed stages although they seemed to embrace characteristics of these stages in varying degrees. Findings also showed that if subjects performed the proposed stages more iteratively or non‐sequentially, then a greater amount of creativity was needed to accomplish the information‐seeking task.

The paper offers a discussion on the relationships between creativity, complexity of tasks, and levels of expertise in domain knowledge.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for creative information seeking drawing upon Weisberg's argument that creativity exists in everyone, and mapping the creative process described in the holistic model of creativity to the information seeking activities identified in the behavioural model of information seeking.

Using scenarios of information seeking behaviour, mappings between the creative process and information seeking activities were refined and six stages for creative information seeking were proposed. Scenarios were also used to provide theoretical justifications for stages in creative information seeking.

Evidence gathered from the scenarios seemed to indicate that the type of information seeking task may have an impact on the extent to which an information seeker exhibits all stages in the framework. This is on‐going research. Part II of this paper aims to conduct empirical studies and gather evidence to verify the framework and examine this observation in more detail.

Proposes a framework for creative information seeking.