At the SIGUSE session “Do we know it all? An examination of the state of user studies” during the 2001 ASIS&T Conference in Washington, DC., questions were raised about how researchers of information behavior are defining such key concepts as information “users” and “use” in their work. From the ensuing albeit brief discussion it was clear that researchers are defining these concepts in different ways and that new terms—such as “actors” in place of “users”—are being used to describe related phenomena. The panelists and members of the audience concurred that further discussion is sorely needed regarding terminology and its operationalization in the field. In the literature these pivotal notions of users and use have not been thoroughly addressed since Zweizig and Dervin (1997), who proposed distinctions among library “use,” “users,” and “uses” based upon their analysis of studies on public library use. Current studies that focus on potential and non-users of information systems, along with alternative ways in which people benefit from information systems (i.e., beyond simple searching and acting on information) dicate the need for re-examining our meanings and operationalization of the primary concepts guiding information behavior research. During this SIGUSE technical session, presenters will address how key concepts such as “use” and “users” are being defined in current information behavior research along with implications for research design and analysis. Presenters will explain how they define these concepts in their research and how the field, at-large, might be viewing them. Questions guiding the discussion includue: “Is it time we expanded our definitional approaches to users and use?” “If so, on what theoretical and empirical bases?” and “How should we change these approaches?” Specific topics to be addressed by the presenters are summarized as follows. “Use” and “User” imply a particularly instrumental view of a human being's relationship to information, as well as an assumption of separation between the information and the user of it. It is appropriate at this moment in the history of the field to expand and enrich our sense of this relationship, by understanding information seeking and interaction as much more integral to human functioning on a day-to-day basis. New interest is developing in studying people's relationship to information in daily life, in hobbies, and in avocational interests. The current information environment has at the same time increased the potential for people and organizations to get and use relevant information, and provided researchers with the opportunity to think more broadly about information use. These same conditions a) have made it more difficult for managers of digital information systems to determine how well people are able to use and benefit from their systems and b) have contributed to pressure from funders and the public to measure effectiveness from the perspective of use. Studies of the context of use of digital systems including community information systems will provide information professionals with the knowledge and approaches they can use to effectively evaluate the outcomes of use of digital information services and greatly increase knowledge of the types of contributions that information systems make to a community. Researchers can effectively draw from conceptual frameworks, such as social capital, that have brought together previously unrelated research. Currently, much of our research concentrates on system use rather than information use. Most studies investigate one incident of system use at one point in time rather than information use over an extended period of time. Pressing questions for improving information retrieval are related to people's use of information. What do people do with the information they are seeking? What tasks are they striving to accomplish? What problems do they have in applying information to accomplish their tasks? Only by asking questions related to information users and use can we begin to address the real information needs of people using information systems. In studies of information use in the work place, most recently lawyers and a longitudinal study of a securities analyst, I have found that the information systems available for them are exclusively source oriented rather than task oriented. For the past few years, I have been working with the concept of communities of practice as cohorts of users who have similar information tasks and needs. I have developed a graduate course on User Centered Information Services and Systems that centers on the concept of identifying the tasks and information needs of a community of practice. Students have studied people seeking to adopt a child, buy a house, start a business, survive breast cancer, care for an elderly parent, and many other communities of practice that have critical information needs that are difficult to solve in the present state of information systems. An expanded view of information use and users is necessary for the field to move to a place where we are addressing the problems that people are facing in their use of information.