Scholars from different disciplines study serious leisure from different perspectives. For example, psychologists are interested in the personal benefits of serious leisure, like how involvement in indoor and outdoor hobbies can help people to find new passion and purpose in life and how it can enhance their cognitive and emotional wellbeing. At the same time, sociologists explore its social benefits and explain how engagement in voluntary activities in charities creates social ties, improves social inclusion, and ultimately can improve social wellbeing.

I explore this area from the information science perspective, and I am fascinated by the richness and diversity of embedded information activities in this context. My research shows serious leisure is an information-intensive context, and serious leisure participants interact with information resources via diverse platforms and use various types of information for different purposes. However, they have exceptional patterns of information practice which makes their information behavior unique in one way or another.

For example, they eagerly search multiple sources and passionately share the collected information within their communities of interest. Moreover, they develop exclusive methods to sort the collected information and keep it for future use. Furthermore, they produce complete details on their chosen activities which are not easily accessible in conventional information sources.

Therefore, I believe the standard terminology in HIB scholarship is insufficient to describe their information activities. We need a new vocabulary to capture their unique information behavior. Nonetheless, it seems the concept of “information curation” is one of the existing terms that we can use for this purpose. Whittaker (2011, p. 1) defines information curation as: “where familiar information is used as a personal resource that we keep, manage, and (sometimes repeatedly) exploit.”

In another definition, Jacobson (2012) highlights some distinctive features of information curation, such as creativity and community, and defines it as a holistic approach that combines information seeking, encountering/serendipity, use, and sharing to practice originality, creativity and identity construction.

My research shows that serious leisure participants are passionate about their hobbies or voluntary activity. As a result, they are usually so eager to locate related information and develop exclusive methods to keep, organize, and share information related to their chosen practice. Therefore, they typically move beyond conventional information activities. As a result, they are actively engaged in information curation and creation, making their serious leisure even more joyful, purposeful, and meaningful.

References

Jacobson, J. (2012). Information curation. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 49(1), 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504901269

Stebbins, R. A. (1982). Serious leisure: A conceptual statement. The Pacific Sociological Review, 25(2), 251-272. https://doi.org/10.2307/1388726

Stebbins, R. A. (2007). Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Whittaker. S. (2011). Personal information management: From consumption to curation, In B. Cronin (Ed.) Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 45, 1-42, Wiley, Medford, NJ. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/aris.2011.1440450108