This special issue of the journal honours Mark Hepworth, Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University, who for many years pushed forward the boundaries in studies of people's information behaviour and their information experience. His research concentrated on how people interact with and use information to enable them to achieve their objectives. This interest evolved over many years while studying different groups of people, for example patients with multiple sclerosis, carers and students. This led to understanding their information behaviour, needs and the factors that affect their information experience, with a particular focus stemming from these studies being the need to consider people's information capabilities and information literacy.The articles in this special issue reflect several of the topics – health information, development studies, and information behaviour – that characterised Mark Hepworth's career.