The serious leisure frontier in library and information science: Hobby domains

The library and information studies (LIS) field conducts a minority of research into leisure realms while favoring scholarly and professional contexts as subjects. Such is the case despite compelling evidence of the desirability and profundity of leisure in human life. This article introduces one popular form of leisure, hobbles, as a potentially provocative topic for LIS scholarship. To facilitate research on information within hobbies, the article discusses two conceptual devices: Serious leisure (Stebbins, 1982) describes essential characteristics of leisure, establishes that some types are information-rich, and provides a framework to study leisure systematically; The collectivist theory of domain analysis (Hjorland and Albrechtsen, 1995) orients research to the hobby milieu and its objective information forms, recasting them as "hobby domains." As an example of the application of both devices, a case study is reviewed of the information resources in the hobby of cooking. The article closes with a call to action and suggested research program for the study of hobbies in LIS.