Library Trends

More than three years ago, when we launched the project of a special issue of Library Trends on the theme "Joy of Information," we were unaware of the road ahead. In an unexpected and thoroughly unjoyful turn, the world entered a relentless COVID pandemic that brought hardship and loss to almost everyone. Then, the murder of George Floyd by police was a tipping point to mass outrage, a social rupture, and a reckoning with systemic racism among other forms of injustice in North America. At the same time, there was an unprecedented economic collapse, the most controversial presidential election in American history, and a catastrophic environmental crisis became ever more unavoidable and ominous. As co-editors, we felt trepidation that the concept of "joy" was far from the minds of the general public, the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), and our authors—who had been invited to write their manuscripts as this perfect storm reached its zenith. In truth, we doubted whether "Joy of Information" was an appropriate collection to deposit permanently in the literature of LIS at this time.

However, thirty-six people responded to our call to explore the theme. When they delivered their manuscripts via email, multiple authors shared that writing the paper was a bright spot in their lives amid the troubling events. Other papers brought forward unexpectedly uplifting aspects of the pandemic or lent momentum to the unfolding conversation on social justice. As Brent Dean Robbins, a social psychologist and authority on joy, states poignantly in his foreword to this collection, paradoxically, a "brokenness of spirit" and joy often come together and are the complete formula for personal and social transformation.

From an intellectual history perspective, LIS is a latecomer to what other social sciences have embraced as a "positive" movement, which serves as a high theoretical umbrella and justification over this special issue. A positive approach is not to be confused with positivism, an epistemology centered [End Page 445] upon fact-based investigation. Rather, the positivism we are speaking of recognizes that academic disciplines rightly prioritize the study of problems but holds that we must also pay attention to aspects of the human experience that are functional, and especially those that are flourishing. Otherwise, we will have an incomplete understanding of the human condition and not know what outcomes and future we are striving to achieve. First advanced in the field of psychology by Martin Seligman, positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living, focusing on both individual and societal well-being (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). The approach has matured into its own literature, conferences, and educational programs. It has sparked movements across the social sciences, and positive sociology and positive education are also burgeoning. Following these precedents, Jarkko Kari and I (Kari and Hartel 2007) translated the same logic to LIS in "Information and Higher Things in Life: Addressing the Pleasurable and the Profound in Information Science," which was a call to action for a positive LIS. This special issue continues in the same direction.

Actually, since at least the late 1980s, glimmers of the concept of joy have been found in the LIS literature, though these writings employed varying terminology and diverse conceptualizations over the decades. Kuhlthau (1989) characterized an affective dimension to information behavior and affirmed students' feelings of exuberance and confidence during information seeking. Bates's (1995) comedic rift on the study of information, "Nevertheless," is an assuredly playful and even joyful monument in our literature. Serious leisure and hobbies have been established as research frontiers (Hartel 2003), with myriad positive information behaviors and activities. LIS scholars theorized a pleasure principle underlying information behavior (Fulton 2009), described numinous or transcendent experiences with museum objects (Latham 2013), and defined happy information sharing (Tinto and Ruthven 2016). Statements on casual leisure (Elsweiler, Wilson, and Lunn 2011), spiritual information (Kari 2007; Siracky 2013), contemplation (Latham, Hartel, and Gorichanaz 2020), personally meaningful activities (Gorichanaz 2019), fun (Ocepek et al. 2018), and the pursuits of passionate people (Mansourian 2020) all fall in the same neighborhood as joy. Meanwhile, methodological advances such as document phenomenology (Gorichanaz and Latham 2016) and...