Information curation in serious leisure: How passion generates purposeful information activities

Scholars from different disciplines study serious leisure from different perspectives. 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. 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. 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.