Achieving “information fulfilment” in the networked society: Part 1: Introducing new concepts

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of information fulfilment. The networked society provides many opportunities for information flow. However, information professionals readily accept that, although you are surrounded by information of many sorts, in many formats, what is important is whether users consider that they ever achieve what is known as "Information Fulfilment", i.e. occurrences when there has been information which is accurate, timely, current and presented in an appropriate and useful format to allow (work) tasks to be completed. This first paper contains a literature review which informed the study. The study (which will be reported in detail in a later paper) was interpretive and used ethnography (through participant observation) as the research tool. The research deals with issues surrounding organisation structures and examines levels of information fulfilment in micro substantive settings. The paper serves to introduce background and cultural information from a small section of a larger European research project which involved five countries and was partially funded by TEMPUS and Leonardo da Vinci Socrates grants.