On November 18, Ian Ruthven, a senior professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, UK, delivered an academic report entitled Life transitions as an information behavior process: supporting life changes with informationto the faculties and students of the Business School of Nankai University.

Professor Ian Ruthven pointed out that human life (including family roles, social roles, work types, work positions, etc.) is not always stable, and there will always be many transitions or changes. When events characterizing these transitions or changes occur, people have to directly face the uncertainty or anxiety brought by the new environment or field. People always hope to quickly eliminate the negative impact brought by these uncertainties or anxiety, and quickly integrate cognitively and emotionally into the new environment or field, to smoothly transition from the previous state of life to a new one. Professor Ian Ruthven believes that information plays an indispensable role in the whole process of transition , because the nature of information is to help people eliminate as much uncertainty as possible, so that they can solve the problems with stable emotions.

Professor Ian Ruthven made an in-depth exploration of (users') information behavior in the context of major life transitions from the perspective of information behavior research. Through the demonstration and analysis of a large number of related theories, he has constructed the (life) transition theory based on information behavior, which reveals the information behavior process, information demand, and the changes of cognition and emotion state of people in major life transition from the theoretical level, and explains in detail the role of information in different stages of transition, and how information helps people smoothly transition to a new life state, providing a thinking path for the new generation of information system to support the information demand of such users.

Ian Ruthven is a senior professor of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, UK, and the Chairman of the Scottish Library and Information Council. He has long devoted himself to research on information search and information retrieval. He was the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and is currently the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Information Processing and Management, a leading international journal, editor of the JASIST, as well as an editorial board member of international top journals such as Journal of Documentation, Journal of Information Science, Computing Review, and Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval. He was awarded the JASIST Best Paper Award in 2019 and has been cited by Google Scholar up to 5,318 times.

(Reported by Zhang Xiaotong, Zhang Yao and Li Ying, edited and translated by Nankai News Team)