Much research has been conducted in the field of Information Science, as well as other disciplines, on the behavior of information seekers and users. An assumption in the research is that valuable information is available to users, and that optimizing information seeking behavior (ISB) is of benefit to them.

This research usually examines information deemed benign and useful to users, and often to society as a whole. ISB can be a path to growth and improvement, and the goal of optimizing ISB can help users improve life in some way. As we know, however, not all information is benign, not all information is viewed by the larger society as beneficial, nor is seeking such information socially acceptable. Questionable "gray" information exists widely in the form of personal or private data, sexually explicit materials, classified government secrets, computer and network system vulnerabilities, and even intellectual property. These are only a few examples of information types that might fall into categories of unacceptable or potentially "dual-use" information.

Seekers of this information exist, however, and they can demonstrate sophisticated searching skills and techniques. Private investigators, pornography users, foreign governments and terrorists, and criminals and computer hackers all represent information seeking communities, each with unique motivations, behaviors, and practices. Yet little research has been conducted about these groups' information behavior. Reasons might include difficulty of access to these communities, social and legal consequences associated with such information seeking, and lack of scholarly interest in optimizing sub-cultural, illicit, or illegal ISB.

Whatever the reasons, the lack of research into this area represents a gap in our understanding of ISB. The increasing growth of the Internet has created unprecedented potential for optimization of ISB associated with such "high risk information" (HRI). The Internet represents a tool for HRI-seekers that can provide anonymity, security, and efficiency beyond any previously developed. And HRI often carries with it motivations that exceed desires for more banal information.

The purpose of this paper will be to propose a basic theoretical framework for understanding HRI and HRI-seeking behavior. HRI concepts will be examined through a review of existing literature and research, drawing from diverse fields. A basic typology of HRI will be attempted, focusing on the nature of inherent information risk. Areas of categorization may include socially unacceptable HRI ("legitimate" pornography, racism, violence); illegal HRI (child pornography, stolen data, intellectual property and private data); intelligence (HRI dealing with national security or espionage); and technical HRI (system vulnerabilities, hacker exploits). Finally, suggestions will be made for further avenues of research into HRI and HRI-seeking behavior.

The benefits of HRI research can be threefold. First, understanding HRI could provide insight into how to address information problems in which the very nature of the information becomes a catalyst for the problem. Some would argue that the availability of certain information promoting socially unacceptable or illegal behavior contributes to the proliferation of that behavior. Understanding the motivations and behaviors of individuals seeking such information may help shed light on this question. Secondly, given current global conflicts and strife, understanding the behavior of HRI seekers who seek information in order to wage war or cause damage could provide insights into addressing or combating such attempts. Thirdly, by understanding the behaviors of HRI seekers, as well as their mechanisms for finding HRI, we may be able to provide insights into more "legitimate" ISB. HRI is by definition variable, because risk changes with the information, with the user, and with time and circumstance. Many information users and seekers today would consider the information of interest to them to be HRI regardless of whether or not society considers that information to be acceptable. For example, users seeking certain types of medical information, battered spouses or children, or corporate whistleblowers might all view normally "legitimate" information as HRI, given their unique situations. Yet optimizing these users' ability to find and retrieve such information could be perceived as an individual and social benefit, and one worthy of serious examination.

About the Author(s)

Lance Hayden is a graduate student enrolled in the doctoral program at the School of Information at the University of Texas. Lance has worked and studied in the field of information for 12 years, receiving a MLIS from the University of Texas. He has held positions as an information and security specialist with organizations including the Central Intelligence Agency and Cisco Systems, as well as lecturing on information security at the School of Information. Lance's areas of research interest include information seeking behavior and HRI, as well as information policy, security, privacy, and intelligence.

With the unprecedented growth of the Internet as the medium of communication, knowledge has become the new source of wealth, and the sharing of knowledge through collaboration, the key to the success of today's organization. Unfortunately, the mindset of most business people is not one of cooperation but of competition. This all-too-pervasive attitude is the major barrier to the successful implementation of knowledge management (KM) systems. In this article, we address the critical question of how to foster a spirit of cooperation among coworkers, suppliers, and customers through understanding and applying the communication principles of the Internet to create the Collaborative Organization. It is only through collaboration, through knowledge sharing and knowledge co-creation that an organization can tap into all of its knowledge held collectively by its employees, its customers, its suppliers and its business partners. In order for that to happen there are two conditions to be met. One is technical and fairly easy to achieve. It is simply creating an Internet or browser based environment, a knowledge network, in which information and knowledge can be communicated, shared, stored, organized, and created. An example of a knowledge network is presented. The second condition is the creation of an environment of trust, teamwork and collaboration and the promotion of emotional intelligence. It also entails developing a new style of learning one suited for collaboration and not just individual achievement. The Internet is reshaping collaboration and therefore one of the goals of this article to understand how this is taking place and how it can be taken advantage of. If we are going to be able to understand how organizations can develop collaboration strategies we must understand what underlies the success of the Internet as a collaborative medium, a success, by the way, that was not managed but rather developed spontaneously. We make use of the insights of Marshall McLuhan who showed that a medium has a certain effect on its users independent of its content, which he expressed with his famous aphorism, "The medium is the message." We show that the Internet, which is a hybrid technology of telephony and computing, has a unique set of five properties or characteristics ("messages," if you will) that, taken together, make it the ideal medium for collaboration and knowledge networking. They are: - the two-way flow of information - the ease and speed of access of information - continuous learning - alignment and integration of common objectives - the creation of community No other communication medium prior to the Internet possessed all five of these properties to the same extent (although certain media possess some of these properties), all of which are necessary (and sufficient) for creating a successful collaborative organization. This is what makes the Internet the ideal vehicle for collaboration. As a consequence we regard the Internet as both a medium for and a model of collaboration. And it is with that in mind that we have crafted our study to describe the nature of a collaborative organization and, more importantly, how to build one.

About the Author(s)

Dr. Logan obtained his B.S. from M.I.T. in 1961 and his Ph.D. also from M.I.T. in 1965. He spent two years at U. of Illinois as a research associate and came to the University of Toronto in 1967. He is an Associate Professor of Physics. He is a member of the board of the McLuhan Program at U of T. He is cross-appointed to the Curriculum Department of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where he conducts research in computer applications in education and the social impacts of technology and communications. Dr. Logan is the author of three books on communications cum linguistics: The Alphabet Effect (Wm. Morrow, 1986) and The Fifth Language (Stoddart, 1995). His latest book which is an update of The Fifth Language is The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age (Stoddart Press, Toronto, May 2000).

Although today's electronic, scientific journals -- often little more than digitized copies of traditional print journals -- have not realized the full potential of hypermedia environments, they have nonetheless achieved a revolution in text distribution on the Internet. Much current scholarship (e.g. Besek, 2003; Harnad, 1997, 1999, 2001; Kiernan, 1998, 1999) has focused on the serious challenges to traditional notions of copyright, peer review, and economic viability that this revolution has entailed. These challenges were driven home by the recent, widespread boycott of the various online Naturejournals (among others) organized by the Public Library of Science. However, what has been overlooked are the ways in which these changes in text distribution are revising notions of scientific argumentation, and thus are changing the collective memory practices that construct scientific disciplines.

In particular, studies on electronic publication have neglected how the re-mediation (in Bolter & Grusin's 1999 sense) of print journals relates to the simultaneous re-mediation of scientific instruments and tools (such as genome and image databases, and virtual simulations). These online instruments and tools, like the journals, serve as collective repositories of scientific information. In many cases, a scientist who wishes to publish an article in a scientific journal must also submit relevant data to an associated database before the article will be published. Thus, these collective instruments and tools both complement and compete with the journals. An entry in a collective database, for example, complements a journal article because significant information is distributed between these two online, disciplinary artifacts: to understand an article's textual argument, readers must seek out the evidence in the associated database. On the other hand, these instruments and tools compete with the journals and their article archives because the databases serve as alternative repositories of a discipline's collected information. Several scientists in different fields have seriously claimed that an entry in a collective database ought to replace certain types of full-text articles. Not only should the entry count for tenure/promotion purposes in the same way as a full-text article, the entry should be citable. Because scientific arguments rely heavily on citations of previous studies to build historical and disciplinary contexts for their findings, this re-mediation of scientific information is changing how a discipline's collective memories are maintained. In short, the medium that once stood supreme for maintaining a discipline's official collective memory -- the scientific journal -- is being repositioned and challenged by these new collective instruments and tools.

This presentation reports on a case study of four scientists and their articulation (in interviews) of how they have changed their argumentation practices to accommodate the simultaneous re-mediation of scientific journals and scientific instruments/tools. Their statements raise several issues: how should they reconstruct their disciplinary histories using both the journals and these new databases? how can they best preserve the information found in both types of disciplinary artifacts? how should they cite the information, and which citation (the journal article or the database entry) should take precedence? In examining these topics, this case study analyzes a current, steady process that is redefining what it means to do scientific research, and what it means to report and remember it.

About the Author(s)

Karen Lunsford has recently completed her dissertation on Distributed Argumentative Activity and will be joining the faculty of the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.