Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

When I got home yesterday, I discovered Mary K. Chelton’s and Colleen Cool’s new anthology, Youth Information Seeking Behavior II: Context, Theories, Models, and Issues (Scarecrow, 2007) waiting for me. I grabbed it and ran to my hair appointment. This time, I didn’t grab my usual guilty pleasures stack of glossy new magazines. I was the only one in Bella Gente flipping through a carefully documented book on information studies.

My participation in this collection marks a career tipping point. It’s the first time my work appears near the work of my research heroes. My chapter is: “It’d Be Really Dumb No to Use It”: Virtual Libraries and High School Students’ Information Seeking and Use: A Focus Group Investigation.

Mary K.’s and Colleen’s first collection informed both my research and my practice. It collected a kind of greatest hits volume–conveniently gathering together folks whose writings I love to discover in various journals. I find myself continually returning to that volume, chewing on and citing its contents.

I’ll be reading Volume II on the plane to Seattle.