Digital technologies, particularly Web 2.0, have allowed people to perform complex information tasks within the more mundane spaces of their everyday lives, such as creating articles on Wikipedia, or transcribing old documents on the World Archives Project. Increasingly, amateur groups such as hobbyists, collectors and other types of enthusiasts, are coming together online to collaborate in complex information work, despite not having any professional experience or qualifications.

This suggests a trend towards a potential democratisation of information work; that tasks such as classification and indexing is no longer merely in the hands of those in the LIS professions, but also in those of the layperson. This talk focuses on media fans, and how they have collaborated together to develop innovative and creative ways of dealing with digital information, from large-scale, multimedia-supporting, volunteer-run archives, to an elaborate curated folksonomy that mitigates the problems of both traditional subject headings and tagging systems.

It also asks whether LIS can learn from and harness the passion, obsession and pursuit of pleasure that drives fans to engage in information work.

About the Speaker

Ludi Price is an alumna of, and an Honorary Visiting Fellow with #CityLIS, and is also Far Eastern Cataloguer at SOAS, University of London. In 2017 she was awarded her PhD in Information Science with her thesis, Serious Leisure in the Digital World: Exploring the Information Behaviour of Fan Communities. Ludi research interests focus on information behaviour within fan communities, and she is also deeply involved in the fan community as a fan artist, writer, and a mentor to younger fans and peers. This, coupled with her practitioner experience, influenced her research interests, and inspired her to ground her research in both LIS and fan studies.