Information Encountering Analysis

Information Encountering Analysis, developed by Sanda Erdelez and articulated in her 1999 Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science article 'Information encountering: It's more than just bumping into information,' studies how people acquire useful information by accident — while searching for something else, or while not searching at all. Against the dominant picture of information behaviour as goal-directed seeking, Erdelez foregrounds serendipitous, incidental discovery as a distinct and important mode. She models an encounter as a sequence of functional steps — noticing, stopping, examining, capturing and returning — and classifies people by how readily they encounter information, from non-encounterers to 'super-encounterers' who experience and exploit accidental discovery frequently. The framework gives a vocabulary and analytic structure for a phenomenon long dismissed as mere luck.