The relationship between people and information is central to many academic disciplines. The information sciences have always, and in recent decades particularly intensively, investigated how people relate to information and how they search for, find and use it. Nevertheless, for this discipline as well as for anthropology, epistemology, cognitive research, economics and sociology, human information behavior remains a fundamental question that has still not been resolved. This volume is the first to comprehensively present the current state of knowledge from a wide variety of perspectives. 'Information behavior' proves to be not only a "fundamental question of the information society", but also a central condition of human existence and society.