Professor of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University, where she has been appointed as teacher and researcher since 1996. She received her PhD in Information Science in 2001. She is teaching in knowledge organization, information seeking, and information and knowledge management. During 2004–2005 she was a visiting researcher at School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University. She is also Docent in Information Management at University of Tampere.

Her research fields concern information behavior, information and knowledge management in business organizations, and aspects of social capital and knowledge sharing in groups and organizations. She has published widely in her areas of expertise. She is project leader of two larger research project financed by the Academy of Finland. One of the projects investigates social aspects of information behavior on both individual and organizational levels. The other project is looking at various aspects of library 2.0 and web 2.0 and social media.

She has been involved in several collaborative networks such as board member of the Finnish University Network for Communication Sciences, chairman of the Finnish Association of Information Studies, Leader of the Knowledge management group in the Socrates project: Library and Information Science Education in Europe, and member of the advisory board of the DREaM project (Developing Research Excellence and Methods), UK, http://lisresearch.org/dream-project/. She has been external expert in several different evaluation committees; e.g. evaluating the Library and Information Science education in Sweden commissioned by Swedish National Agency of Higher Education, and Uppsala University research evaluation KoF11 (Quality and Renewal). She is on the editorial board and reviewer of The Electronic Library, Finnish Information Studies, Journal of Information Science, Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, Organization Studies, Information Processing & Management.