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Information seeking does not occur in a vacuum but invariably is motivated by some wider task. It is well accepted that to understand information seeking we must understand the task context within which it takes place. Writing is amongst the most common tasks within which information seeking is embedded. This paper considers how writing can be understood in order to account for embedded information seeking. Following Sharples, the paper treats writing as a design activity and explore parallels between the psychology of design and information seeking. Significant parallels can be found and ideas from the psychology of design offer explanations for a number of information seeking phenomena. Next, a design‐oriented representation of writing tasks as a means of providing an account of phenomena such as information seeking uncertainty and focus refinement is developed. The paper illustrates the representation with scenarios describing the work of newspaper journalists.

The authors wanted to provide an enriched understanding of how lawyers keep up-to-date with legal developments. Maintaining awareness of developments in an area (known as “monitoring”) is an important aspect of professional’s information work. This is particularly true for lawyers, who are expected to keep up-to-date with legal developments on an ongoing basis.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with a group of lawyers who authored and published current awareness content for LexisNexis – a large publishing organisation. The interviews focused on identifying the types of electronic, printed and people-based current awareness resources the lawyers used to keep up-to-date with legal developments and the reasons for their choices.

The lawyers mostly used electronic resources (particularly e-mail alerts and an electronic tool that alerted them to changes in website content), alongside interpersonal sources, such as colleagues, customers and professional contacts. Printed media, such as journals and newspapers, were used more rarely and usually to complement electronic and person-based resources. A number of factors were found to influence choice. These included situational relevance, presentation, utility and trustworthiness, the speed of content acquisition and interpretation facilitated by the resource.

The authors' findings enrich their understanding of lawyers’ monitoring behaviour, which has so far received little direct research attention. Their design suggestions have the potential to feed into the design of new and improvement of existing digital current awareness resources. Their findings have the potential to act as “success criteria” by which these resources can be evaluated from a user-centred perspective.

This research aims to identify some requirements for supporting user interactions with electronic current‐awareness alert systems based on data from a professional work environment.

Qualitative data were gathered using contextual inquiry observations with 21 workers at the London office of an international law firm. The analysis uses CASSM (“Concept‐based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits”), a usability evaluation method structured around identifying mismatches, or “misfits”, between user‐concepts and concepts represented within a system.

Participants were frequently overwhelmed by e‐mail alerts, and a key requirement is to support efficient interaction. Several misfits, which act as barriers to efficient reviewing and follow‐on activities, are demonstrated. These relate to a lack of representation of key user‐concepts at the interface and/or within the system, including alert items and their properties, source documents, “back‐story”, primary sources, content categorisations and user collections.

Given these misfits, a set of requirements is derived to improve the efficiency with which users can achieve key outcomes with current‐awareness information as these occur within a professional work environment.

The findings will be of interest to current‐awareness providers. The approach is relevant to information interaction researchers interested in deriving design requirements from naturalistic studies.

Reports an interview study into information seeking and use by journalists at a national British newspaper. Describes work activity in the context of a series of behaviour shaping constraints and cognitive and external resources. Describes the journalist's information seeking as motivated by originality checking (of the angle), developing a personal understanding, discovering/confirming potential content and also describes information gathering and managing multiple information spaces. Shows how these are motivated by context, facilitated by resources, and how they enrich the journalist's resource space. Also shows that journalistic work is uncertain as a function of an uncertain context and their continually evolving plans. These result in provisional and unstable relevance judgments, and, during later stages, the reinitiating of preparatory information seeking activities, including the relocation and review of previously read documents. At the end presents a model to summarise the findings.

To explain how cumulative efforts contribute to learning and literacy development.

A representation of how efforts lead to lasting growth is discussed through a variety of historical and current perspectives across content disciplines. This chapter includes depictions of how positive experiences can promote further success and recognizing one’s cumulative efforts and the effects from those are fundamental to educational attainment.

The value one places on tasks such as reading or writing is often aligned to the frequency with which those events occur. Students view their time and effort as capital; they are students’ most valued possessions, and how they allocate these commodities is a choice.

For students to become avid readers and writers, we must utilize a host of strategies to impress the notion that these activities are worth their attention, time, and investment.

Masculinity and heavy metal share a clear and well-documented relationship, with many of the key texts on metal centering around its representation of gender (Walser, 1993; Weinstein, 1991). Less discussed is masculinity in Australian metal, as Australian metal itself remains underrepresented in scholarly research. In this chapter we discuss the music, media and image of Parkway Drive – a popular metalcore band from Byron Bay, Australia – via a reading of two of the band’s feature-length rockumentary films. We draw on concepts and theories of gender (Butler, 2006), and public image (Leonard, 2007), as well as studies of Australian masculinity, specifically those pertaining to mateship, surfing, and adventurousness. As the metalcore subgenre has not been widely studied, this approach provides a basis for understanding the subgenre as well as its relationship to gender, commercial success, and Australian heavy metal, focussing on the decidedly Anglo-Australian representation of masculinity performed by Parkway Drive. We argue that the band typifies a distinctly Australian type of hegemonic masculinity, one that draws on discussion of Australian identity, beach culture and surfing. We further examine the band’s use of ‘rockumentary’ tropes to build their public image and to tighten affective bonds with viewers.