Information Encountering Analysis

Information seeking is deliberate, goal-directed pursuit of information to satisfy a recognized need. Information encountering is the opposite in intent: the person acquires useful information they were not looking for — either while searching for something else or while doing something unrelated to searching. The find is unsought yet valuable. Erdelez argues this incidental, serendipitous mode is common and important, and that studying it requires its own framework because the dominant seek-and-retrieve models, built around explicit queries, simply do not describe how accidental discovery happens.

Erdelez models an encounter as Noticing information in the environment, Stopping the current activity to attend to it, Examining it to judge its relevance, Capturing it by saving, noting or remembering it for later, and Returning to the original task. These functional steps turn a fleeting 'I just stumbled on something useful' moment into an analyzable micro-process. Whether an encounter is fruitful often depends on the examining and capturing steps — recognizing the value of the item and securing it before returning to whatever one was doing.

A super-encounterer is a person at the high end of Erdelez's spectrum of encountering propensity — someone who experiences accidental, useful information discovery frequently, actively values it, and builds it into how they work and learn. The typology runs from non-encounterers through occasional and active encounterers to super-encounterers, capturing the substantial individual differences in serendipitous behaviour. Super-encounterers tend to keep many background problems primed and to scan their environment in ways that make relevant unsought information register, which is why they discover far more by 'accident' than others do.