Towards understanding digital information discovery and curation

Everyday life revolves around the discovery and curation of digital information. People search the Web continuously, from quickly looking up the information needed to complete a task, to endlessly searching for inspiration and knowledge. A variety of studies have modeled information seeking strategies and characterized information seeking and curation activities on the Web. However, there is a lack of research on how existing Web applications support the discovery and management of information, especially concerning the motivations behind them and how different approaches can be compared. In this paper, we present a study of information discovery tools and how they relate to the nature of information seeking. We propose a conceptual framework that deals with the opportunistic and purposeful aspects of how people discover and manage digital information. This framework can be used when designing, evaluating or updating Web applications.