Introduction

While it continues to ebb and flow in its construction and composition, the family (in its many iterations) remains a crucially important and influential social institution and economic construct (Tankersley 2008). As a result, shifting ideologies surrounding “the family” inform and carry implications for economic, political, cultural, and social practices and activities. As Turner and West (2015) note, the family is often considered as a group markedly different from other groups to which individuals belong. This is due to a number of interacting factors, including feelings of obligation, emotional ties, unique communication patterns, and the contribution of family to one’s evolving sense of identity and self-worth (Turner and West 2013).

As a result of this dominance and influence of the family, this special issue centers on family-focused library and information science (LIS) research and is borne from conversations and reflections posed at a 2019 iConference Session for Interaction and Engagement of the same name. In proposing the iConference session and this special issue, we hoped to draw attention to the possibilities that considerations of the family may open up within LIS scholarship, allowing for different ways of thinking about central theoretical concepts and offering alternatives to dominant methodological approaches. Familial relationships have been central to our own work in various ways (e.g., Barriage 2016; Barriage and Searles 2015; Dalmer 2018, 2020), and we have experienced, firsthand, the intriguing questions and unique challenges that situating one’s research within this context can pose.

We kick off our issue with four articles that each take up an information practice approach, highlighting how we might consider different facets of family in deepening our understanding of information practices. Pamela J. McKenzie’s article “Keeping Track of Family: Family Practices and Information Practices” provides a helpful overview of the concept of the family, contextualizing the complexities in defining family and why studying the family is of importance generally, and in LIS more specifically. In asking forty-seven participants what they need to keep track of in daily life, McK-enzie’s results reveal how participants’ information practices maintain and define family relationships via three ways: keeping track of, for, and with family. Next, Maria Ortiz-Myers and Kaitlin L. Costello authored “The Information Practices of Parents of Transgender and Non-Binary Youth: An Exploratory Study.” Using semistructured interviews, these authors captured the experiences of parents of transgender and non-binary youth, focusing in on participants’ information work around gender identity, emotions, and parent-child information exchanges. Deborah H. Char-bonneau and Katherine G. Akers report on a literature review in their article “Information Needs and Sources for Family Members of Individuals Living with Mental Disorders.” Their review reveals the complex and often unmet information needs of family members who provide care and support for individuals living with mental illnesses. In their article “Personal Collections and Personal Information Management in the Family Context,” Maja Krtalić, Jesse David Dinneen, Chern Li Liew, and Anne Goulding highlight the intricacies of personal information management from a familial perspective. Using a case study method, they illuminate how five notable individuals and their families manage their collections of documents and artifacts, including the potentially challenging decisions they face and the impact on the transference of their collections to archival institutions.

The subsequent two articles importantly explore the potential bearing of cultural and racial dimensions of familial relations on information activities. As a segue with the above information practices articles, Ruohua Han’s article “Understanding ‘Bao Xi Bu Bao You’ in the Sharing of Emotion-Associated Personal Events in Chinese Families from the Perspective of Adult Children” mobilizes the Chinese saying “Bao Xi Bu Bao You” as a helpful lens to explore the sharing and withholding of emotion-associated information in Chinese parent-child relationships. Next, in LaTesha Velez’s article “‘It Was Like He Was Writing My Life’: How Ethnic Identity Affected One Family’s Interpretation of an Afro Latinx Text,” the author artfully examines the ways Afro Latinx readers in her family were impacted by and found relevance in a text written by a Latinx author based on her family members’ racial, ethnic, gender...