Leisure Studies Commons^™

The Serious Leisure Frontier In Library And Informtion Science: Hobby Domains, Jenna Hartel

Jenna Hartel

Research on information behavior rarely focuses on leisure realms while favoring scholarly and professional contexts as subjects. Such is the case despite compelling evidence of the desirability and profundity of leisure in human life. This article introduces one popular form of leisure, hobbies, a potentially provocative topic for ISB scholarship. To facilitate research on information within hobbies, the article discusses two conceptual devices. Serious leisure (Stebbins, 1982) describes essential characteristics of leisure, establishes that some types are information-rich, and provides a framework to study leisure systematically. The collectivist theory of domain analysis (Hjørland and Albrechtsen, 1995) orients research to the …