Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

Death is an inevitable part of life and highly relevant to information management: its approach often requires preparation, and its occurrence often demands a response. Many works in information science have acknowledged so much, and yet death is rarely a focused topic, appearing instead sporadically and disconnected across research. As a result there is no introduction to, overview of, or synthesis across studies on death and information. We therefore conducted an extensive literature search and reviewed nearly 300 scholarly publications at the intersection of death and information (and data) management. Covering seven topics in total, we review two groups of work directly engaging information management in relation to death (digital possessions, inheritance, and legacy; information behavior, needs, and practices around death), three engaging death and technology that require information and its management (death and the Internet, thanatosensitive design and technology‐augmented death practices, and the digital afterlife and digital immortality), and two reflecting the ethical and legal dimensions unique to death and information. We then integrate the collective findings to summarize the landscape of death‐related information research, outline remaining challenges for individuals, families, institutions, and society, and identify promising directions for future information science research.


| INTRODUCTION
Information is a defining feature of life in the information society (Bawden & Robinson, 2022).Another defining feature of life, in all societies and times, is death.Death is inevitable and ever approaching, and thus motivates, subtly or otherwise, much of life and of information activities: its approach often implies a need for individuals to prepare to transfer important information to family (Krtali c et al., 2021) and for institutions to ensure continued access across generations (Borgman, 2003), and its eventual arrival (or sudden occurrence) often requires a response, like when a donation is unexpectedly bequeathed (Beck, 2014;Day & Krtali c, 2022), or more commonly, must simply be accessed or evaluated and then sold or disposed of (Krtali c et al., 2021;Leaver, 2013).The digital transformation of society and industries continues today, and the norm therein is to accumulate digital information without explicit planning for what happens with/to it at the end of life (Dinneen, 2022;Hellmich & Dinneen, 2022;Krtali c et al., 2021); put simply, a growing proportion of the world are accumulating collections and then dying.
But despite death's ubiquity, inevitability, and its importance for life and for information management, it is as a phenomenon generally unacknowledged and rarely the topic of focused discussion in information science literature.Death thus appears sporadically and disconnected across information science and related research topics, and to our knowledge, there is no encyclopedic review of nor introduction to death as it pertains to information.As a result there is neither an overview of the topics nor synthesis of themes and issues across them, which leaves unanswered several complex questions for individuals, families, institutions, and society.What happens to our information and data when we die?What could and should happen to digital possessions made by or about us?These matters include but extend beyond social media: many individuals keep large, offline digital collections (Dinneen et al., 2019) and rarely prepare their digital collections for transfer to families or institutions (Krtali c et al., 2021), and the deceased are not mentioned by most data protection acts (Bak & Willems, 2022).Thus further specific questions remain open, such as: how does death figure into information behavior, and vice versa?How does information figure in end-of-life planning or responding to the death of loved ones?Importantly, what can information science do to advance knowledge and support of these information management-related questions and contribute to death positivity (i.e.open and honest conversation and education about death; The Order of the Good Death, n.d.) rather than enabling death avoidance and lack of preparedness?
In this review we therefore seek to identify scholarly (published) intersections of death and information (and data; sometimes used interchangeably for legibility) management at any relevant level (e.g.individual, familial, institutional, societal), to establish the state of scholarly knowledge at each intersection (i.e.what has been studied, what is known, and what gaps remain), to identify what fields contribute to research on death and information, to make suggestions for future research directions, and finally, in virtue of conducting the review, to catalyze and promote death positivity in information science research.We begin by outlining our review method, then review the literature across seven topics.In the discussion section, we synthesize findings across the topics, identify important research gaps, provide a summary image of the problem space before making concluding remarks.

| METHODS
The goal of this review is to identify and summarize scholarly works at the intersection of information (or data) management and death, particularly as it might concern information science research, to synthesize their findings, and to identify important or promising directions for future research.We pursued this goal by adapting a toolsupported approach to reviewing literature (Bandara et al., 2011) that has been used in many prior reviews including by the authors for a review of similar scale (Dinneen & Julien, 2020); the procedure thus entailed (1) identifying and extracting literature, (2) analyzing it (e.g.reading, organizing by topic, and describing publication trends), (3) synthesizing the content of the literature, and (4) discussing it and its implications.As the synthesis and discussion are provided in later sections, the identification and extraction of literature and its analysis are described here.

| Literature identification and extraction
We searched several bibliographic databases (Table 1) including those covering general scholarly literature (e.g.Scopus) and subject-specific databases for information science (e.g.LISA).We specifically sought scholarly publications (articles, proceedings, books, reports) describing completed work of any kind (i.e.study, essay, system description, but not thesis proposals nor progress reports, nor publications that are only short abstracts or slides from a talk).As preliminary searches produced a large number of results in English, literature in other languages was not examined.
To retrieve relevant literature, we performed two-part queries comprised of every combination of each of 30 keywords, where the first keyword group (A) represents ideas around death or death and information and the second group (B) represents (subsumes, or can be relevant to) information management and closely relevant topics and fields of study.Although there are certainly deathrelated and information management-related topics within LIS that are not explicitly represented by these keywords, they are presumably covered by the broader terms, and the variety of fields present in the results (below) suggest the terms did not cause false negatives (i.e. if works from anthropology were included, presumably not many information science works were excluded).Query results were then reviewed to identify titles (or highlighted context) relevant to both information management and death.Results were reviewed comprehensively unless they were in the thousands, as happened for some queries (e.g."death" and "social media"), in which case the results were reviewed until two pages (i.e.20 results) in a row were deemed irrelevant.Further, from January 2022 to August 2023 we followed literature alerts for "information" AND "death."Finally, from the most relevant results (e.g.those explicitly and solely about death information management) we followed citations forwards and backwards and reviewed the primary authors' profiles (e.g. on ORCiD and Google Scholar) looking for relevant results.As the literature to be reviewed could (and indeed did) come from various disciplines, we included articles describing cognate and relevant concepts with varying terminology and any tangentially related works that helped elucidate topics seen in the core literature.
This approach identified 421 potential items for review.From these, 18 could not be accessed and 110 were, upon closer inspection, deemed not sufficiently relevant to both death and information (or data) management; this was the case if, for example, the desired topics were mentioned only briefly (e.g.noting in passing that online digital traces might be seen long after one is dead), were only implied or possible but not explicit (e.g. a review of software that may be used to prepare an archive for digital inheritance), or were present but in a way ultimately not relevant to the intention of the review (e.g. using medical data to predict child mortality).Although the time frame for literature was not restricted, and despite the timelessness of the phenomena, the publication dates ranged from only 1994 to 2023, perhaps reflecting the spread of computing and Web technologies.The items are primarily journal articles (134), conference proceedings (78), and book chapters ( 46), but also include books (13), workshop papers (9), theses (8), and reports (5).

| Analysis
After filtering irrelevant and inaccessible items, 293 items remained.A summary of the method so far is presented in Table 1.We grouped the remaining items by apparent topic or field and divided them among our team to read and synthesize into small reviews.We then read those small reviews, discussed trends across them, and integrated the content into seven topics used to structure the review.

| Limitations
We acknowledge several limitations to our approach.Most notably, despite our numerous keywords and databases, information and death are ubiquitous terms that represent broad and common experiences and concepts of humankind and so may be explored and written about under cognate terms not identified by our review.Similarly, our search terms were generated from a small number of known relevant publications, whereas many further terms were identified when reviewing the literature (e.g.data afterlife, hypermourning).The bipartite focus of our review (i.e.death and information T A B L E 1 A summary of the review procedure.

Step or outcome Details
Goal Identify and review scholarly literature at the intersection of information (or data) management and death management) also meant that (1) we did not review nondeath works that might constitute a hidden iceberg of literature (e.g.digital literacy works not mentioning death), and (2) we omit potential topics relevant to other areas of information science, like post-death citation patterns, the handling of human remains in museums, or library collections about the afterlife.Further, although some cultural and religious diversity is present in the discussion below, reviewing only English-language publications entailed excluding discourse from other languages (e.g.German literature on institutions' challenges handling digital donations or digitaler Nachlass) and furthermore Western and Anglo cultural views on death are most strongly represented (the presence of English-language literature from the Global South notwithstanding).Finally, there was considerable subjectivity in our process of determining the relevancy of an item.So although it is our impression that our review did not miss any well-represented and relevant topics and further that a different approach would be unlikely to uncover one, of course there may indeed be such topics and it is likely some items are missing from our review.

| REVIEW
This section presents the findings of the literature review organized according to the seven identified topics (Table 2), beginning with those most directly related to information management (topics 1 and 2).
The first is Digital Possessions, Inheritance, and Legacy (1), which considers the influence of death in the practices and challenges of creating and inheriting digital legacies, the enduring value of digital legacies, and issues of privacy and digital footprints in legacy.This is followed by Information Behavior, Needs, and Practices (2) as they pertain to death.We then cover works with broader concerns around death that nonetheless entail or require information management (topics 3-5), beginning with Death and the Internet (3), which examines death practices online and the management of digital remains and profiles and the deceased.We then review Thanatosensitive Technologies and Technologyaugmented Death Practices (4) and the Digital Afterlife and Digital Immortality (5); the main concepts of both topics require information.Finally, we review works focusing on the Ethics (6) and Law (7) of Information and Death.Many of the reviewed works touch on only one of our identified topics, and so some themes and works necessarily reappear throughout the review.Thus Table 2 summarizes the topics, but the number of items in each topic are approximate.

| Digital possessions, inheritance, and legacy
This section reviews literature concerned with death and its influence on (primarily digital) legacies and their contents, management, and transfer.While some research on this topic comes from information science, much of it is from human-computer interaction (HCI), death studies, and various social sciences.After a short note on the prima facie role of death in digital legacies we review in turn their creation, inheritance, and value, and finally the matter of managing the post-mortem privacy and footprints of the person the legacy concerns.

| Death and digital legacies
Digital legacies are created through, among other processes, personal information management (PIM), or the keeping, organizing, and retrieving of information in personal information collections (Jones et al., 2017), and personal digital archiving (PDA), a practice whereby individuals curate collections of meaningful personal items (Kim, 2013).Both PIM and PDA can be done for their immediate and long-term value during life, and indeed there are many notable studies of digital legacy that do not immediately concern death but rather mention life and lifelong PDA or PIM activities (e.g.Czerwinski et al., 2006;Kaye et al., 2006;Marshall, 2007).Yet personal collections often serve as evidence of a person's life when they are gone (Day & Krtali c, 2022;Kim, 2013) and later generations use them to, e.g."envision the lives of their ancestors" (Kim, 2013, p.156) or examine the endurance of deceased cultural figures (Schott, 2019).As a result, some researchers have argued for the importance of focusing more explicitly on death in PIM and digital legacy research (Dinneen, 2022;Markov a, 2011), and as noted at the 2016 PIM workshop, open questions of digital legacies include: "How can legacy personal information (PI) be passed on to family and friends or to cultural heritage institutions?"and "How can people control what happens to their information after they are no longer around?"(Jones et al., 2016, emphasis added).
The remaining works reviewed in this section take up such questions and make explicit the role of death in digital possessions, inheritance, and legacies.Regarding terminology: digital legacy can refer to a constellation of different phenomena, and can also be inclusive of, or even focused on, online accounts and social media (c.f.Doyle & Brubaker, 2023), which are discussed in a later section.Similarly, terms like family and household are used differently across reviewed works; we interpret and intend the terms inclusively.

| Practices and challenges in creating digital legacies
The creation of digital legacies is often done with death in mind; for example, some people produce memoirs, which they then try to preserve to ensure they are accessible and inheritable (Lindley, 2011(Lindley, , 2012)).Further reasons for intentional curation (as opposed to accidental accumulation) include to influence how we are remembered (Gulotta et al., 2013), to lessen the burden of the bereaved (Holt et al., 2021), for ethical and sustainability reasons that extend beyond our lives (Hellmich & Dinneen, 2022), and to create value by balancing human and computational selection (Pitsillides, 2016).Yet that creation is characterized as a complex process that is changing over time and with the adoption of new technologies (Gulotta et al., 2013).The introduction of digital technologies and information stored online has led to a cultural shift in how many cultures create digital legacies and how they define their relationships with the dead (Pitsillides, 2016).The deliberately and accidentally amassed personal digital data and assets (Lynch, 2013) can contain digital photos, files, social media accounts, E-Mails or digital possessions like E-Books (Maciel & Pereira, 2013) that are often divided among multiple local or online storage systems and services, becoming more incomprehensible with time (Lynch, 2013), and personal legacy management becomes further complicated by the inclusion of digital assets with physical ones (Marshall, 2013;Odom et al., 2010).The creation of a digital legacy (intentional or not) has been studied in different contexts, either focusing on offline digital information, especially video (Clabburn et al., 2019;Manchester & Facer, 2015), or online information like online identities (Gulotta et al., 2013) and emails (Dinneen & Krtali c, 2020), or both online and offline information including digital accounts, data, files and access to mobile devices (Holt et al., 2021).Beyond, and perhaps due to this noted complexity, there are several death-relevant issues surrounding the choice and efficacy of practices in creating digital legacies, which we review next.

| Issues of awareness, knowledge, and skills
A lack of literacy and knowledge about what can happen to data after one's death can significantly impact the creation of digital legacy.Users require the literacies to become familiar with systems and social platforms that host and preserve (or not) their digital data and assets (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019).Similarly, individuals must also be aware of how or if digital legacy services will protect their privacy after death and then choose a service accordingly (Kasket, 2019).Many are also unaware of the value their digital data and assets hold (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019) and lack the knowledge on how to best prepare this data in order to be inherited and become digital legacy (Grimm & Chiasson, 2014;Lynch, 2013;Odom, Banks, et al., 2012).A lack of knowledge about digital legacy management affects all age groups (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Marshall, 2013).Poor personal data management skills may affect the decision-making and choice of social media and cloud storage services as well as understanding their terms and conditions (Marshall, 2013;Odom, Sellen, et al., 2012), especially when those terms and conditions may have long term consequences for managing legacy collections.Improved and simplified systems (and laws, discussed later) are needed to facilitate managing the digital assets of a deceased individual and to prevent data loss (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Odom et al., 2010;Odom, Sellen, et al., 2012) while keeping the sensitive and emotional essence of these processes in mind (Maciel & Pereira, 2013).

| Policy issues
A lack of institutional policy and consistent industry guidelines is an additional impediment to planning and creating digital legacies (Lynch, 2013).Even though digital data is easy to share compared to physical assets (Tungare, 2012), the possession and inheritance of an individual's digital data and assets is often not defined by laws or policies (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Odom, Banks, et al., 2012;Tungare, 2012), and there are software limitations to supporting shared ownership of content (Maciel & Pereira, 2013), which make it difficult for people to ensure their heirs will have access to online content such as social media accounts or cloud storage (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019).To help individuals create digital legacy plans (i.e.personal policy), one might adapt advice on how to prepare the execution of a will: while this includes specific steps to be taken regarding online and offline as well as digital and paper-based financial and personal information (related to assets, insurance, pension, important contacts, location of important estate planning documents), the advice may be nonetheless transferrable.Specifically, information should be identified, organized, documented, and regularly reviewed and updated to ensure the implementation of estate plans (Wiener, 2014).

| Curation approaches and responsibility issues
The importance of curating digital legacies (especially with large online archives) is stressed by several authors (Gulotta et al., 2013;Hellmich & Dinneen, 2022;Holt et al., 2021;Pitsillides, 2016), and many empirical studies with a focus on death have sought to understand digital legacy management or curation practices (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Grimm & Chiasson, 2014;Marshall, 2013;Odom, Banks, et al., 2012) and people's decisions regarding the preservation and access of digital artifacts (Banks, 2013).As mentioned above, some motivations for creating a digital legacy include intentional deselection and deletion to reduce burdens on the bereaved or for sustainability reasons.But challenges with simply deleting part of ones' digital information or virtual identities are also highlighted in those works, and questions remain about who should make decisions about what to keep and thus actively be involved in creating cultural legacies (Gulotta et al., 2013;Hellmich & Dinneen, 2022;Pitsillides, 2016;Pitsillides et al., 2012).
Regarding social media as a part of personal digital archives, Cannelli and Musso (2022) suggest more awareness is needed (on behalf of users and platforms) of "the risks posed by the ephemerality of the digital world and the need for specific provisions that go beyond the shortterm retention of data" (p.259).It appears long-term preservation is left "solely to the users" (p.278) and the authors urge platforms to raise user awareness of the importance of social media preservation for personal digital archives.Condron (2017) concisely sums up the complexities of assessing all the digital data accumulated: "no one solution exists to address the common problems of having too many accounts, too many online systems, and too many digital documents" (p.viii).To capitalize on this fact, digital estate planners offer to handle people's digital possessions after their death; however, like the digital afterlife industry (discussed below), the responsibility of their services is questionable because they are generally short-lived start-ups who are more interested in selling users' personal data than in providing ongoing services or long-term preservation (Kneese, 2019).

| Design issues
Literature exploring the design of systems for creating digital legacy encompasses design principles, guidelines, and tools to support individuals in creating meaningful and personalized digital artifacts and cohesive family archives (Odom et al., 2012).Attempts to improve systems' design have considered death-specific design ideas (discussed further below; Pitsillides, 2017Pitsillides, , 2019)), employed age-and value-sensitive design methods (Thomas & Briggs, 2014), proposed the capturing of life-long records and wishes for post-death portrayal (Gurrin et al., 2015), and envisioned innovative system architectures (e.g.unified succession management platforms; Kim et al., 2012).Looking forward, studies have acknowledged people's sentimental attachment to physical artifacts and the importance of integrating these into digital legacy systems (Kirk & Sellen, 2010) and identified the potential for technology to support family archiving practices while elucidating household and family systems (Kirk et al., 2010).Systems that leverage these findings and solve the above issues are yet to be widespread (or possibly even developed), but what these studies show is the close connection between the design of the systems, information management practices, and affective aspects of building personal and family archives.Overall, they collectively highlight the need for thoughtful design to meet the diverse needs and contexts of users in both creating legacies and accessing them after inheritance.

| Practices and challenges in inheriting digital legacies
Death is not only a biological act but also a social one wherein relationships between the living and the dead continue, and so bequeathing and inheritance can be considered acts of communication between the deceased and the living that reflect and extend those relationships (Odom et al., 2010).Importantly, inheritance (digital or otherwise) is emotional, complex, and not necessarily positive for the inheritors, and so can be met with avoidance (Odom et al., 2010).Many of the difficulties of managing a digital legacy (e.g.identified above) pass on to those who inherit it (Holt et al., 2021).For example, heirs might not be able to define a meaning and a worth to inherited digital data and assets or even know how to locate and access them (Holt et al., 2021;Lynch, 2013), or the deceased individual might have assigned a different value to their assets than the people that inherit them, resulting in the loss of assets (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Pitsillides et al., 2012).Similarly, even if individuals plan for their digital legacies to be transferred, which is rare, the bereaved may not know how to handle or may not have access to valuable digital assets (Holt et al., 2021;Wiener, 2014).The bereaved thus risk experiencing the loss of someone a second time when they lose whatever connection was kept alive through preservation of their information and data (i.e.second loss; Bassett, 2018Bassett, , 2019)).Further challenges pertaining to inheritance are discussed next.

| Human factors impacting collection transfer
Several studies explored intentions, awareness, and challenges in relation to collection transfer and addressed human factors that may impact collection transfer between owners.For example, people often lack awareness of the need to plan access to online digital assets (Peoples & Hetherington, 2015) and lack proactive skills around pre-mortem password sharing and handling the accompanying technostress (Pfister, 2017).In examples of family PIM where collections were inherited after death or will be transferred/preserved after death, uncertainties that people experience around trust and responsibility, as well as affective factors, can impact the transfer of personal collections.Nevertheless, the likelihood of successful transfer increases with proactive conversations, joint efforts, and clearly established responsibilities (Krtali c et al., 2021).Although many people today have a desire to have a curated digital legacy after death, pre-mortem curation is often considered "tomorrow's problem" (Reid, 2021, p. 142), echoing the idea of benign neglect described by Marshall (2016).There are also wider challenges, like property rights, that can affect decision to transfer copyrighted material; such challenges may be tackled by improving awareness and creating services to simplify planning and managing digital heritage (Bellamy et al., 2013a(Bellamy et al., , 2013b(Bellamy et al., , 2014)).

| Digital legacy technologies
In an attempt to provide solutions to some of the above described issues, research has explored ways in which technology shapes the practices, attitudes, and challenges surrounding the inheritance, curation, and access of digital artifacts left behind by individuals.The common aim of these studies is the development of insights and strategies for the effective preservation and dissemination of digital legacies within families and communities, which often entails beginning with identifying systems' limitations (e.g.Holt et al., 2021;Locasto et al., 2011).Emphasized among identified design concerns are the need to incorporate decay and information purging (Gulotta et al., 2013) and the potential of interactive systems to facilitate and influence curation of inherited data (Gulotta et al., 2015).Such works also demonstrate the impact of technology on the evolving roles and responsibilities of users in relation to death and remembrance, fulfilling the wishes of the dead, and the need for exploration of future effects on personalization, memory, and information management for families (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023).
Existing and potential systems have also been investigated, though proposals are more common.For example, the advantages and disadvantages of Google's Inactive Account Manager (IAM) have been identified: it effectively lets users configure certain aspects of how their account will be protected, accessed, or managed over time (Prates et al., 2015), but some uncertainty remains regarding its legal power and the assignment of particular post-mortem responsibilities (Maciel et al., 2015).Regarding novel approaches to account and legacy succession, the requirements for succession managers have been explored (Byrd, 2016;Kim et al., 2012;Maciel, 2011) and a platform has been described that would manage assets, debts, and wills in line with the cultural and religious values of its intended users (in this case Malaysian Mulisms; Mobidin et al., 2019).
Tangible advances in practical advice and usable systems both remain rare; in two short articles some possible platforms for posthumous legacy management are named, but it is advised that because tools are still generally insufficient, people should leave access for family through lawyer or will (Moorefield-Lang & Lang, 2020;West, 2017).

| The value of legacies for individuals, families and society
Reuse is an important factor for deciding whether or not to keep data in a personal archive (Marshall, 2013).Studies on digital legacy recognize the sociological and cultural significance of physical and digital artifacts and the needs and challenges of preserving and accessing virtual histories and archives for present and future generations (Locasto et al., 2011;Waagstein, 2014).Such studies shed light on the unique considerations of individuals' digital footprints, identity management, and the broader sociotechnical systems that support interactions with digital artifacts.Pitsillides et al. (2012) argue that personal memories must contain meaning and contribute to a personal narrative.However, personal archives are also part of our cultural record and need to be examined in relation to the deceased individual's personal social environment as well as the broader contemporary social milieu (Kwiatek, 2012;Lynch, 2013).Garde-Hansen (2009) argue that although social media platforms (especially Facebook) serve primarily corporate interests, because they also function as social archives (e.g. they collect, archive, and present human memory and experience), they pose certain challenges to civil institutions (Garde-Hansen, 2009).Even though social media can create the illusion of users being in control of what/how they present online, the individual and collective memories are likely monitored with no personal control over how these footprints can and will be presented (Kasket, 2019;Pitsillides et al., 2012).Therefore, social media platforms as political and social structures that have value beyond any value for an individual are essential in understanding digital archiving and digital heritage.Policies are needed that answer the question of who is responsible for the preservation and accessibility of social media content, not just on the individual level, but also what kind of data will become part of our collective record (Lynch, 2013;Pitsillides et al., 2012).It is worth noting again that deletion is a necessary step in that decision process.

| The management of post-mortem privacy and digital footprints
Privacy remains important and complex after death, and while its ethical dimension is examined below, its role in digital legacy is mentioned here.Of course, inherited personal digital data and assets can be not only preserved (or lost) but also distributed, with or without prior consent (Tungare, 2012).Regarding the online identities and accounts that contribute to digital legacies, several specific challenges arise due to the changing nature of the information in question and the technologies used.Individuals use online identities under their real name, anonymous or under pseudonyms and accounts might be active, abandoned or deleted (Gulotta et al., 2013).Online identities may not fully represent someone's life: incomplete information is captured or shared online and individuals lack control over the lifespan of their digital information online.Further, the large number of accounts held by an individual may be difficult to manage (Gulotta et al., 2013;Holt et al., 2021).While systems should be designed to mitigate these challenges, care needs to be taken to prevent negative, unintended consequences like identity theft and other ethical and privacy issues (Gulotta et al., 2013).Complementary to this observation, Holt et al. (2021) propose and critically reflect on the use of password managers to create digital legacy plans by exploring which type of information or account individuals would like to plan, hide or ignore, thus indicating the sensitivity of this information with regards to privacy and security.Although the importance of considering post-mortem privacy for individuals as well as keeping in mind the future stewards of the digital legacies is sometimes known to people, most individuals do not make digital legacy plans (Holt et al., 2021).These studies had relatively demographically homogeneous and security-aware participants; further research could study individuals of different cultures, socio-economic statuses, and those with a more urgent need to create digital legacy plans.

| Information behavior, needs, and information practices
The literature of this section focuses on people's information needs, behavior, and practices that are present when one is faced with death, whether as the dying or as the bereaved.The topic has so far received relatively limited attention (Fourie, 2020) but has already begun to examine needs and behavior in perimortem planning and coping (i.e. in light of the approaching death of oneself or someone else) and the use of the deceased's data for remembrance.

| Death-related contexts of information needs and behaviors
Death occurs in different ways: naturally due to age or health reasons, unexpectedly through catastrophic events, or as a result of life termination (Baker, 2004;Fourie, 2020).Depending on the circumstances, different information needs arise for the affected individuals or their survivors.Existing information behavior research explores death and dying from various perspectives, focusing on the needs of the living, the dying, the bereaved, and the dead (Ochôa & Pinto, 2019).Information needs and practices regarding death have been explored with content analysis (Baker, 2004), surveys (Case, 2008;Zimmerman, 2023), person-centered statistics (Graham et al., 2020), interviews (Case, 2008;Frohlich & Murphy, 2000), and literature reviews (Fourie, 2012(Fourie, , 2020)).Research has examined individuals knowingly approaching death (e.g. because of a lifethreatening disease; Baker, 2004;Fourie, 2012Fourie, , 2020;;Sofka, 2020) as well as carers (Baker, 2004;Fourie, 2012Fourie, , 2020)).Further, the perspective of suicide survivors (individuals who lost someone to suicide; Zimmerman, 2023) and of those in grief for losing someone to death (Droser, 2020;Fourie, 2020) are existing.Regardless of one's role, when confronted with death or the passing of someone close, information is needed to make sense of the situation (Fourie, 2012;Zimmerman, 2023).Death often is associated with unanswered information needs, followed, for example, by frustration, a deterioration of the overall situation and different forms of information behavior to answer the current information or knowledge gap (e.g.seeking, discovery).As research on counseling psychology has acknowledged, providing information during post-death times comes with risks (e.g.unwanted or insensitive reminders), but can also be a form of survivor advocacy (e.g.providing information about grieving via social media; Sofka, 2017aSofka, , 2017b)).
One important perspective on information needs and death is that of terminally ill patients receiving palliative care, who may have particular information needs across broad topics like physical decline, symptoms (especially pain), stress of the illness on family members, and financial burden.The information needs could not be predicted by patient characteristics (e.g.age, educational level, diagnosis, functional status, or participation in hospice), which means that health care providers need to address diverse needs and concerns of the terminally ill (Kutner et al., 1999).Technological interventions like support for recording and making available end-of-life wishes (e.g. via an app; Cross, 2013) could therefore play a vital role in patients having their needs met.The medical literature seems to have focused more on passing information from the medical staff to the patients, rather than the other way around (Ostherr et al., 2016).A small number of publications from medical scholars have touched upon patients' needs concerning information sharing, digital legacy, possession, and inheritance, including a lack of involvement of palliative care professionals in discussing digital legacy with their patients (Coop & Marlow, 2019), creating digital legacy as videos (Clabburn et al., 2019), or recording end of life preferences (such as wishes about resuscitation or preferences for dying at home rather than in hospital) in a way that is accessible by medical professionals encountering that patient (Cross, 2013).Together these topics indicate an opportunity to educate and involve health and social care professionals in digital legacy creation as part of advance care planning.Finally, a systematic literature review on information technologies in end-of-life care (Ostherr et al., 2016) established that video, Websites, and phone calls were used to provide information or education and serve as decision aids.However, the literature reviewed there was from 1997 to 2013, so newer technologies like mobile video chat were not reviewed and the effectiveness of technologies in comparison to face-to-face interactions in such cases was not examined.

| Reminiscence as an information practice
An additional theme represented in information behavior studies is the use of information for remembering or reminiscing.Reminiscence is often used by older individuals to remember their life and cope with their death (Graham et al., 2020).Older people (51-72) have been observed to share online (on Facebook) in order to be remembered (e.g. as kind and caring; Schoenebeck & Conway, 2020).Further, memories can serve the bereaved to remember someone deceased using their analog or digital legacies (Frohlich & Murphy, 2000;Schoenebeck & Conway, 2020;Sofka, 2020).Nevertheless, the use of shared information online and on social media, as well as the interaction with deceased individuals' profiles, is still linked to many challenges (Ochôa & Pinto, 2019;Sofka, 2020), such as data protection, (re)usability, accessibility, and other ethical, moral and legal aspects that need to be further discussed (Sofka, 2020;Tsaasan et al., 2015) because the will of the deceased person is often not documented, even less often in digital form (Micklitz et al., 2013).

| Addressing information needs and behaviors through death positivity
Death can be a cause for information avoidance; for example, in end-of-life situations, some groups may be hesitant to seek information from healthcare professionals (Shiroma & Xie, 2022).People generally may be unwilling to prepare for death, perhaps because it requires facing their own mortality; one survey suggests only a few online users (5%) have plans or requests for their online or social media afterlife following their death (Norris et al., 2018).This may not be true for all groups, however: older adults are more concerned with their mortality than younger individuals (Graham et al., 2020) and patients affected by life-threatening diseases generally face their prognosis and the potential finality of their current circumstances (e.g.Bressel, 2022;Fourie, 2012Fourie, , 2020;;Lambert et al., 2009aLambert et al., , 2009b)).Consequently, those groups may be more likely to prepare plans or document their wishes for their digital afterlife and legacy.
The matter of expressing and providing for information needs and practices is not just for the dying, bereaved or health care providers.It is also a social issue of promoting death positivity.Chabot (2019) proposes that libraries are well positioned to play a part in the death positivity movement, which aims to remove the stigma around death that is particularly prevalent in North American culture.Information is related to the good death in many ways, among them are PIM processes that allow individuals to put their personal, financial, medical, and legal affairs in order before death.Libraries could take various actions to support the death positivity movement.These include collection development, providing universal access to information about dying, death and bereavement and offering community outreach programs, e.g. a death cafe for exchange on the topic or practical workshops to help with bureaucratic elements related to death (Chabot, 2019).Studies that examined how digital technologies influence our relationships with the dead have often mentioned a culture of death-avoidance in many countries (the different studies named Brasil, the United Kingdom and the United States) and presented it as a possible reason to avoid managing a personal digital legacy (Kasket, 2019;Maciel & Pereira, 2013).However, the integration of the dead into our online spaces and our everyday lives, might challenge this culture (Kasket, 2019).Involvement in death positivity could be one way to encourage individuals to engage in digital legacy planning, but also bring awareness of the needs and information practices related to death.It seems that there could be an opportunity for collaboration as accountants, health professionals, librarians and information professionals could work together on aiding individuals with digital legacy planning.

| Death and the Internet
This section reviews research about the effect of the Internet on death culture or vice versa, where information and data play a notable role and thus information management is a constant and often explicit requirement.A number of works-primarily in Internet and media studies, death studies, human-computer interaction, anthropology, and sociology-acknowledge that just as the Internet has changed our lives, so too has it changed our deaths (Drescher, 2012).Such works thus address the resulting question of how significant online presence of the dead changes the way we grieve and deal with death.Most research on this topic explores changing practices of memorialization and bereavement (e.g.Bourdeloie & Julier-Costes, 2016;Wright, 2014) and calls for greater collective awareness of issues and changes, questioning the responsibility of individuals, social media service providers and technology developments (Kohn et al., 2012), but also design and functionalities of technology that can aid grieving.Methods used in these studies range from interviews and surveys to content analysis of social media posts, policies, to technology probes.The overall focus of the studies presented in this section is on the intersections between attitudes and practices of individuals, families, communities, institutions, and society.

| Death online: Grieving, remembering, and memorializing online
The presence of death on the Web and in Internet communication has enabled virtual counterparts to human activities like grieving, remembering, and memorialization (Veale, 2004).The Internet has thus become a collective memorial landscape where the emergent phenomenon of digital memorials (Moncur & Kirk, 2014) enable (or force) commemoration and remembrance (Acker, 2018;Church, 2013;Gulotta et al., 2014;Kwon et al., 2021), community (Sofka, 1997), public grieving (Carter et al., 2014;Gibbs et al., 2014;Pitsillides et al., 2013), and the demonstration of kinships (Leaver, 2015) and solidarity (Harju & Huhtamäki, 2021).In contrast to traditional grave sites where the dead are sequestered, socially dead, formal, and relatively intransient, on the Web (especially in memorial) they are visible, social, personal, and possibly fleeting (Graham et al., 2015).There are many millions of personas and profiles of the dead online (Öhman, 2019).Death is indeed such a common phenomenon on the Web that even false announcements of death are frequent (Nansen, O'Donnell, et al., 2019) and methods have been developed to automatically identify profiles of the deceased (Jiang & Brubaker, 2018a, 2018b).
"The study of death online" (Hutchings, 2016a) is closely connected to the transformation of memory cultures and the concept of digital memory (Döveling et al., 2015;Lagerkvist, 2013Lagerkvist, , 2015)).Research on this theme thus explores platforms like blogs (Sofka, 2012) and social media as (relatively) new spaces to grieve and mourn (Bassett, 2015;Brubaker & Hayes, 2011;Egnoto et al., 2014;Moore et al., 2019;Moreman & Lewis, 2014), often comparing and connecting practices and affordances of online memorialization to conventional rituals of grief and mourning (Bovero et al., 2020;Brubaker et al., 2013;De Vries & Moldaw, 2012;Kohn et al., 2018;Meese, Gibbs, et al., 2015;Mori et al., 2011;Nansen et al., 2014).The bereaved and the organizations that support them are turning to the Internet, similarly to how they once turned to print media (Jones, 2004), to explore a multitude of new ways to feel connected to both the living and the dead (Arnold et al., 2017), to share and manage grief (Hutchings, 2016b), to make sense of and add levity to death (Nikishina et al., 2020), to visualize and celebrate the lives of the deceased (Leaver & Highfield, 2015, 2018), and to access social support in online bereavement groups (Massimi, 2013).As a result, death practices have shifted from relatively private affairs to being experienced more publicly, often with a public record of the grief (Graikousi & Sideri, 2020) and with new possibilities for unwanted participation (e.g.trolling; Marwick & Ellison, 2012) and dissatisfaction with platforms' services and policies (Lingel, 2013).
As the Internet is a space where the living and dead continue to socialize (Kasket, 2019), digital technologies are also changing the memorialization of the deceased, for example through more common appearance and thus participation of the dead in the ongoing lives of the living (Gould et al., 2019).Online memorialization has implications in several domains, for example it can facilitate coping and support (Brubaker et al., 2019;Williams & Merten, 2009) and allow freedom of speech (Williams & Merten, 2009), especially in societies prone to censorship and prohibitions (Linden, 2021).Collective online practices can also broaden the Western model of grieving dominated by individualism (Kasket, 2019), though norms around grieving arise from different cultural and social contexts and can, therefore, be conflicting in online environments (Gach et al., 2017).Even though studies examined the phenomenon of death throughout individuals of different nationalities, locations and religions or belief systems (Kasket, 2019;Odom et al., 2010) and found differences based on religion (Grimm & Chiasson, 2014;Maciel & Pereira, 2013), most of the research has focused on English-speaking, Western societies (Gould et al., 2019).One exception is a study of digital butsudan, Buddhist Japanese altars used to care for and maintain relationships with deceased family members (Gould et al., 2019): modern butsudan have online presences and offer digital services that are cheaper and more accessible than physical services, but these services raise questions about consent and literacy that mirror the issues of online memorialization services mentioned above.

| The dead online: Digital remains, posthumous data management, and posthumous social media profiles
The notion of human remains has changed in the digital age.Two key questions explored in research addressing the theme of digital remains are how the dead "persist and continue to participate as social actors through platforms" (Gibbs et al., 2015, p. 255) and how digital remains may be useful for exploring "the relationship between the Internet, the body, remembering and forgetting" (Graham & Montoya, 2015, p. 287).With the accumulation of digital remains of people who have passed away (Öhman, 2019), the deceased can appear to persist like the living (Meese, Nansen, et al., 2015) and even maintain a personal and often personified presence within the domains of the living (Öhman, 2020), and when publicly available such remains create public digital mortuary landscapes (Ulguim, 2018).Recent decades have seen the accumulation of social media profiles belonging to the dead (Öhman & Watson, 2019(Öhman & Watson, , 2021)), which has opened new issues of ownership, ethics, and transparency (Tietz et al., 2018).As scholars have noted, change in deceased user policies has often been solely in the hands of legislators (McCallig, 2014) and legislation about death, like legislation in other digital domains, "highlights the limitations of how we currently approach identity in computational spaces" (Brubaker, 2015, p. 231).Scholars have also begun to examine how social dimensions like race intersect with digital remains, for example by asking how much agency Black individuals have in the use and interpretation of their digital remains under white and Western ideas about archiving and remembrance: "these digital remains are not only what we create but also what is created about and for us" (Sutherland, 2023, p. 7).
Post-mortem data and profile curation create a range of challenges (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023;Öhman & Watson, 2019) as social media platforms, often with limited ways of identifying deceased users (Brubaker & Callison-Burch, 2016), continue to weave content of the dead into people's daily lives (Gach & Brubaker, 2020).Such data continues to circulate through online spaces intersecting with emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots (Nansen, Hjorth, et al., 2019).Posthumous data management inevitably raises questions of ownership and legacy, which manifest in at least two ways: inheritance and post-mortem data and profile persistence.
Research on this theme questions how digital legacy passes from one generation to another (Bellamy et al., 2013a;Lira et al., 2022) and what happens with the boundaries of ownership, access, and governance over personal archives when survivors engage in the personal collection of the deceased (Acker & Brubaker, 2014).Solutions suggested in the literature include proactive practices of individuals such as leaving passwords while alive (Leaver, 2013), social media providers encouraging users to make decisions to manage their accounts proactively (Guzman, 2017), posthumous data planning assisted by data categorization and automated tools (Bahri et al., 2015;Kennedy, 2009), and stewardship as an alternative model to inheritance (Brubaker et al., 2014).Exploring post-mortem profile management, Gach and Brubaker (2021) investigate how people set up a post-mortem data and profile management system and who they choose as their legacy contact (and why).They found that the post-mortem manager's expectations are not met during times of grief, which may suggest that such systems require a setup process that is fundamentally different from the quick-clickthrough standards of everyday interaction design.Insights into post-mortem data management can help identify system requirements and be a source of consultation for software engineers, interaction designers, and information researchers (da Silva & de Medeiros, 2021; Maciel et al., 2021).
In addition to the questions of ownership and access, the persistence of digital systems creates new issues for data owners and inheritors.Not only because of the possibility of the service ceasing to exist (Odom et al., 2010), but also because storing data and memories on social media means having to accept possible changes in structure and organization (Garde-Hansen, 2009), which is also applicable to cloud and online services.Inheritors often feel deep responsibility for the data they inherited, and may not feel safe entrusting it to a third entity in fear of data loss.The fear of loss also extends to the presence of a deceased individual on social media (Odom, Sellen, et al., 2012): users have expressed a strong preference for social media accounts, blogs, and posts to either be deleted or passed on to their inheritors.Users have also criticized the lack of account settings that would make it possible to decide if or what part of their footprints they want to leave online (Grimm & Chiasson, 2014) However, research shows that some categories of user, e.g.young adults or those who have not given death much thought, have low level of awareness of impact of death on online information, including its management, passive persistence after death, and its use in memorialization (Braman et al., 2013;Cupar et al., 2023).Nevertheless, put in a wider context, Leaver (2018) calls for a broader sense of agency across all life stages on social media.For a complementary overview we encourage readers to consult a review of 31 HCI works on digital legacy and online accounts (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023), which proposes a multigenerational digital legacy data lifecycle comprised of encoding (e.g.representing one's identity in an account), accessing, and dispossession (e.g.account transfer or deletion).

| Thanatosensitive technologies and technology-augmented death practices
This section discusses the idea of designing technology with death in mind and specific examples of technologies introduced into existing death practices or rituals, which generally require curated and managed information and data in their use.Most of the studies reviewed in this section come from HCI and design fields and focus on the use of technology by individuals, though some consider use by death industries (e.g.funeral companies' adoption of technology).A focus of many of these works is on the functionalities of technology to support narratives people want to tell in relation to death (Gulotta et al., 2016).
In addition to developing design concepts and studying users, many works acknowledge and explore the complexity of the intersection of death and technology, such as the relevance and influence of different ages and cultural backgrounds (Bos, 1995;Foong, 2008;Odom et al., 2018;Uriu et al., 2006;Uriu & Okude, 2010;van den Hoven et al., 2008), the entanglement of interactive technology and spiritual death practices (Uriu et al., 2018(Uriu et al., , 2019)), and the curatorial aspect of such artifacts (Wallace et al., 2020).Works have also touched upon broad legal, ethical, technical, and professional issues that affect information systems (Boscarioli et al., 2017;Maciel & Pereira, 2015), such as the social influence of technologically mediated relationships with the dead (van Ryn et al., 2017) or the adoption of death-related technologies for digital archeology (Graham et al., 2013).

| Digital artifacts in death practice
As examples of thanatosensitive design in practice, several works develop digital artifacts to support the honoring and mourning processes.Some digital artifacts serve communication between mourners (van den Hoven et al., 2008) while others provide pictorial representation to digital memorials (Bos, 1995;Chaudhari et al., 2016;Odom et al., 2018;Uriu & Odom, 2016;Uriu & Okude, 2010;Wallace et al., 2020) or a combined representation of physical and digital remains of someone deceased (Uriu et al., 2018).The artifacts differ in their various focuses (e.g. the digital representation of loved ones, sometimes enriched with additional information) but also in their physical design (Odom et al., 2018;Uriu et al., 2006), which may allude to existing death practices (e.g.tombstones, Häkkilä et al., 2019) or not.What they all generally require to operate and be effective are remains, which must first exist (i.e. have benefited from prior management) and must then be more or less formally curated, managed, and preserved.And notably, although the imperfections of technology often entail a loss of digital content and memories (Nansen et al., 2016), this feature has been considered for its natural and useful role in mourning, which can be designed for (Sas et al., 2016).
Finally, although research on changes to funeral practices and in the funeral industry is outside the scope of this review, it is worth mentioning that technologies are intertwined with the materiality of the funeral practices (Nansen et al., 2014) and therefore death rituals and funerary practices are being changed by information technology (Nansen et al., 2014(Nansen et al., , 2017(Nansen et al., , 2023;;Uriu et al., 2019), for example through online funerals (Alexis-Martin, 2020) or the application of robots (Arnold et al., 2021;Gould et al., 2021).Thanatotechnology is thus an important intersection of information, technology, and people, including culture; for example, as funeral industries in Western societies become more privatized, their death-related practices are developing toward more individual-focused services (Odom et al., 2010).Notably, because the digital divide extends to thanatotechnology (Gilbert & Massimi, 2012), information researchers may be interested not only in the information management entailed thanatotechnology but also in issues of access, literacy, and equity.Similarly, Sas et al. ( 2019) outline a research agenda for digital death that encourages a deeper comprehension of the role of technology, beyond curating collections, toward encompassing support for the dying process, integrated digital craft in death technologies to aid the bereaved, and understanding tangible interaction to support innovative digitalization of death rituals.

| The digital afterlife and digital immortality
The survival and presence of, and interaction with, digital fragments after death-traces, remains, personal information, and data-blurs the boundaries of analog life/ death with digital life/death and for some suggests some sense of digital life after analog death (Mazzetti Latini et al., 2017).This idea in turn prompts consideration of what can and should be done with such materials (Braman et al., 2011) and, broadly, what it means to live and die in the age of digital technologies.Some people want to ensure that their digital materials survive and remain accessible to achieve what is called a digital afterlife, or persistent digital presence.An ongoing digital post-mortem presence of course requires the preservation of and access to the relevant digital materials, and thus an industry has emerged to support, and maybe exploit that fact with the promise of perpetuity (Lagerkvist, 2017).Described as "intentional digital afterlife providers" (Bassett, 2020, p. 78) and providing services beyond posthumous digital messaging (Jamison-Powell et al., 2016), they provide subscription platforms that "enable people to control how they are remembered after they die" (Bassett, 2020, p. 78).In short, the dying or the bereaved upload digital artifacts characteristic of the afterlife-bound person and set permissions to achieve a kind of persistent digital representation of them (for an accessible introduction, see Paul-Choudhury, 2011).Bassett (2020) argues that the digital remains left behind by the deceased are not created with the intention that they allow one to live on, but rather they are considered memories that are inherited and should be "treated differently" (Bassett, 2020, p. 82).That no doubt happens as described and is likely the most common case today, but of course, that does not preclude that someone intends or prepares their digital remains to be used in such a way (e.g.along with their digital collections; Bassett, 2022).When this is done with clear intention and strong personification-like data-driven avatars or AI-powered bots that interact with the bereaved via chat or social media as the deceased (i.e.thanabots)-it is called digital immortality (Meese, Nansen, et al., 2015;Savin-Baden, 2021;Sisto, 2020;Sofka et al., 2017).A relatively new phenomenon, digital immortality appears attractive to individuals who wish to achieve it.But it also holds potential for use in digital archeology, where deceased individuals with rich data footprints or digitalized materials could be digitally resurrected to represent their bygone times to those studying them (Ulguim, 2018).However, this so-called immortality has been critically questioned regarding its helpfulness in grieving and for its ethical implications (discussed below), and it has thus been characterized as a phenomenon "where technological innovation used to remember the dead meets an attempt to resurrect them" (Goff, 2020, p. 137).
Whether intentional or not, the possibility of continued digital presence provides choices to the dying (i.e. to persist in that way or not) and also to the bereaved, particularly for mourning and memorial: some may opt to erase the digital presence of the deceased, some may immortalize them as bots, and some may simply create memorial spaces for them online (Bourdeloie, 2015).And whether initiated by the dying or bereaved, persistence requires practical actions to curate and preserve digital remains, possibly in advance of death but certainly after.Scholars have commented on such practicalities by reminding about the vulnerability of digital remains and the consequent risk of "decay of digital personhood" (Stokes, 2019, p. 80) and by pointing to policies for the stewardship of digital remains and advocating for proactive digital advance directives as a strategy for navigating the digital afterlife of data (Sofka et al., 2017).The ethical dimensions of such data are discussed below.There are of course also practical matters for an individual (dying or otherwise) to consider if they create and curate toward a digital afterlife, like long-time archiving, source selection (e.g.social media or private collection) and data preparation, afterlife platform selection, stating intentions in a will, and so on (Micklitz et al., 2013;Sofka, 2020).However, since death can occur unexpectedly, scholars suggest such proactive planning should be independent of the current life situation (Baker, 2004;Fourie, 2012;Zimmerman, 2023).Further, users must consider that platforms are not eternal but indeed can be precarious, so reliance on their services for preserving digital content poses the risk of potential loss of cherished personal content (Banks, 2011(Banks, , 2013)).Personal devices to achieve similar immortalization without an online intermediary have been proposed (c.f.Odom et al., 2010), but are not widely available or adopted.
If the reader finds the term digital immortality somehow misleading, they may be happy that scholars are theorizing and considering to what extent digital immortality really emulates or achieves the spirit of the idea it promises.For example, authors have conceptualized four modes of digital afterlives and described their interaction with technology (Fordyce et al., 2021): through a surrogate who represents/post on their behalf; through relatively simple automation in the form of scheduled posts/messages; through algorithms that respond to posts or otherwise create content that personifies the deceased; and through AI.Complementary research examines the transformation of identity through the creation and use of avatars in digital immortality (Galvão et al., 2021) and follows earlier work on digital biographies or "digital ghosts" of the deceased, which encompass digital remains as well as beliefs and values (Steinhart, 2007).Such studies prompt reflection on identity, ethics, and the enduring impact of information, technology, and life after death.Further authors sympathetic to the idea of digital immortality are discussed in the section on ethics, below.
Beyond practical concerns and conceptual puzzles in digital immortality, there are also broader social concerns around digital remains, such as their influence on the balance of power structures or the future of privacy (Lagerkvist, 2017), as is explored in a recent and notable edited book that explores the legal, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of digital remains (Savin-Baden & Mason-Robbie, 2020).The book spans scholarly perspectives and topics from the cost of storing the dead's data to the accidental and intentional creation of digital memories, and calls for a deeper contemplation of psychological and ethical questions of the collection, storage, and use of digital remains of the dead.Works have further considered the general implications of the digital immortality movement, such as the extent to which people in a digital society can really meaningfully author their own post-death story (Özdemir et al., 2021), the social effects of the persistent digital presence of the deceased (as digital zombies or digital angels ;Hutchings, 2019;Tietz et al., 2018), and the appropriation of social media spaces for such memorialization (Biçer & Yıldırım, 2022).

| The ethics of information and death
Considering the numerous potential ethical issues of information management and death alluded to in the review above, surprisingly few works have begun to directly engage such issues.To do so, however, is important, as it concerns many people, living or dead, and is thus rife with ethical considerations (Cupit et al., 2012;Öhman, 2020).Discussions have emerged in the literature around two topics, authored primarily by philosophers.
The first topic discussed is post-mortem data use and how it may harm or compromise the dignity of the dead.There, scholars have argued that ethical transgressions to the deceased can occur (e.g.upon their informational bodies); for example their privacy can be invaded by exploring their digital remains (Bollmer, 2013), their consent and 'right to oblivion' may be violated by digitally resurrecting them (Maciel, 2011;Maciel et al., 2015, p. 627), and they may be slandered or misrepresented by social media or digital afterlife industries (Öhman, 2018;Öhman & Floridi, 2017).To minimize such problems, it has been suggested that companies should inform users about the potential display of their data after death, users/avatars should not be depicted "radically differently" from what they selected or provided, and users should "only upload data that belongs to them personally, that is, not making bots out of a deceased relative or friend" (Öhman & Floridi, 2018, p. 320).
Similar and further issues can occur in the handling of the health data of the deceased (Bak & Willems, 2022;Krutzinna et al., 2019b).The donation of personal health data in particular is a complex and multifaceted issue where the deceased are prominently considered, for example in a recent book covering relevant concepts, governance, use, and ethics (Krutzinna & Floridi, 2019).Although that book concludes with an ethical code for posthumous medical data donation (Krutzinna et al., 2019a), advice for ethical handling of broader contexts of post-mortem data benefit so far only from proposals to exercise contextual exceptionalism; that is, posthumous data should be respected, treated with care, and handled as befits the particular context (Bak & Willems, 2022;Bollmer, 2013).
Discussion around the second topic has considered the idea that people undergo a second (and possibly final) death if their personal information is deleted (Stokes, 2014), akin to the sentiment that one dies a second time the last time they are remembered.Such works thus consider the obligations that might consequently arise, for example to preserve the information of the deceased.Bruneault et al. (2023) provide a useful summary of such works, introduce the theoretical framework motivating them (Floridi's information ethics), and explain why that framework might imply such obligations.In short, people (and other entities) are not only constituted of biological matter but also of information (i.e.we are also inforgs), which has the consequence that we exist outside of our physical form (i.e. also as information) and thus in some sense we survive or persist beyond our biological death (Floridi, 2013).
Works participating in this discussion consider in what sense the dead really persist (e.g. as moral patients) and what exactly the moral obligations might then be for platforms (i.e.social media) who preserve and provide access to the deceased's information, data, digital remains, and so on (Stokes, 2015).Patrick Stokes has focused on how losing or deleting information created by or about the dead can constitute a second death (Stokes, 2012(Stokes, , 2015(Stokes, , 2020a(Stokes, , 2020b(Stokes, , 2021) ) and has noted that deleted or compromised digital remains impact the "ontological and ethical status of the dead" (Stokes, 2015, p.378).Several studies have then built on Stokes's work to consider the fear of experiencing a second death (or second loss, as the bereaved; Bassett, 2018Bassett, , 2019Bassett, , 2021;;Clarke, 2020) and the implications for continued bonds when social media profiles are lost (Sofka et al., 2017).As described above, there are numerous options for postmortem data management and persistent digital presence (or absence), which may be considered in advance of death or only afterwards by the bereaved.Stokes's ideas imply certain obligations that may limit those choices, particularly for the bereaved; however, scholars have also considered the limits of such obligations that the dead or their digital remains can impose (Pijselman, 2022), and so the topic is far from settled.

| The law of information and death
Many scholarly works have examined the legal aspects of death and information and primarily focus on ownership, possession, legal definitions, and improving the law to better support individuals and commerce.
Digital data, information, and digital footprints are still not clearly defined as personal property nor digital assets (Edwards & Harbinja, 2013a;Harbinja, 2017b), which is complicating their inheritance and use after the original creator or owner has passed (Tarney, 2012).Especially the ownership of content produced and published on social media can be unclear due to missing or unsettled regulation, which results in users lacking legal control over that content during life and afterwards (Fuchs, 2021;Harbinja, 2017d;Nekit, 2020aNekit, , 2020b)).Some argue that since digital data and content are attached to a specific user, creators should be able to decide what happens to this part of their legacy after their death (Zaleppa & Dudley, 2020), and legal experts thus further argue for including digital assets and content into digital property law (Nekit, 2020b).Although posthumous medical data donation is relatively intensely regulated, it entails legal considerations as unique as its aforementioned ethical considerations (Harbinja, 2019c).
Works have also investigated the legal implications of social media platforms' features and policies related to post-mortem profile management and inheritance (Fuchs, 2021;Harbinja, 2017d;Nekit, 2020a;Viana et al., 2020).Social media platforms often lack sufficient account management features (Harbinja, 2017d(Harbinja, , 2019a), e-mail services do not generally facilitate post-mortem control or transfer (Harbinja, 2019a), and privacy issues may result from digital afterlife products like those reviewed above (Harbinja et al., 2023).Finally, it has been explored how the expanded commercial use of individuals' digital information and assets requires corresponding legal protection (Banta, 2017).In the United States, private contracts between service providers and individuals regarding digital assets heavily favor providers (Banta, 2014) and limit the individuals' ability to control the transfer of digital assets at death, which threatens their posthumous privacy (Banta, 2016) and thus requires a reform of succession laws (Banta, 2014(Banta, , 2017)).It is further acknowledged that the digital assets of minors are notably absent from current laws (Banta, 2019a;Banta & Cahn, 2019).

| DISCUSSION
Having identified, categorized, and reviewed the scholarly works about information management and death as it might concern information science research, it is apparent that various intersections of death and information are present in many aspects of life and thread through individual, familial, institutional, and societal levels.Next we draw together the reviewed studies, across their respective topics, to describe the high-level knowledge about and remaining gaps in each level from smallest to largest (i.e.individual to societal, with some inevitable blurring).Further, in Figure 1 we visually present some of the key phenomena identified, arranged spatially according to their approximate occurrence before, near, and after death (terms near the center occur or apply throughout), and all surrounding the four stakeholder groups through which everybody passes (Massimi et al., 2011): the living, who are aware of their mortality, the bereaved, who have experienced the death of someone else and go on without them, the dying, who are themselves approaching death in some relatively more immediate sense, and the dead, who have arrived at the inevitable but are remembered by the living people.The thick, imprecise lines in the background represent different fluctuating flows of information and data that may increase and decrease in importance and volume throughout life and death.Importantly, those lines are also indicative of the myriad connections between phenomena across the pre-, peri-, and post-death phases; for example, digital footprints may accumulate during life and then slowly be lost after death, thus contributing to second death, whereas a collection for a digital legacy may stop accumulating in retirement, then as a result of post-mortem recognition it may be enriched with digital traces and contribute to digital afterlife.

| The individual level
A person accumulates information throughout their life with more or less effective PIM practices (Jones et al., 2017).People also use their personal information to form and present a sense of identity while they live and after they are gone.When kept, a personal collection contributes, possibly together with other information traces and online accounts, to the creation of a digital legacy that people often choose to keep, whether intentionally or through benign neglect (Marshall, 2016), with or without explicit plans (Brubaker et al., 2014) or inheritors (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023), and with considerable challenge and risk of loss, toward the hopeful satisfaction of their plans and the benefit of others.
The question of how to prepare that legacy in anticipation of death comes up frequently in life and in scholarly literature, but has appeared impossible to answer; beyond somehow preparing remains to minimize uncertainty for inheritors, advice has been rare.This scarcity of advice seems due in part to the fact that desired outcomes and specific goals of such legacies seem to vary wildly across cultures and individuals, and so presumably singular advice cannot be given.But perhaps there are really not so many broad cases, and we should not wait on a singular solution; rather, perhaps there could be a list of profiles/options to help individuals identify and set goals, adapted to various cultures, and with respective advice and (if desired) tools and software to achieve those goals.Research and open-source tools are sorely needed as currently the two solutions seem to be 'figure it out yourself' or 'pay the digital afterlife industry', and each with notable risks.The former approach is unclear, daunting, and evidently not commonly done, possibly with the help of a guide that is limited to the local laws of its year of publication and constrained by a lack of research.The latter, which amounts to uploading everything to a site and paying a provider, supports a (so far) questionable industry and may not actually be a good long-term solution if the site disappears.Even the relatively recent scholarly sources that link to and recommend such online platforms (e.g.West, 2017) often lead to abandoned Websites.
Beyond guidance, another key challenge in preparing collections is understanding people's motivations, literacies, and challenges, as well as their death-related information needs, behaviors, and practices.People in the elderly age group, who may be dying or who have likely experienced the death of someone close, show more awareness of (if not more inclination to act on) the value of managing one's information and profiles for legacy purposes and the associated burdens and challenges (Dissanayake & Cook, 2019;Thomas & Briggs, 2014).However, gaps exist in exploring these issues as perceived by different age groups, and so do gaps in understanding the implications of more subtle nuances of cultural and societal norms surrounding death and mourning.As was noted, research is also needed to understand the extent to which the introduction of legacy plans and the possible obligation of plan completion (i.e. for the use of online services) on social media is meaningful and feasible.The intersection of relevant skills and literacies with broader challenges, such as data protection, the sensitivity of content, and the ways providers ensure accessibility and long-term archiving of the content (Kasket, 2019;Micklitz et al., 2013) would also from further research.
We found no literature about information and non-human death, e.g. that of plants or animals, even from a human perspective (e.g. about pets), nor about the nominal 'death' of synthetic, informational agents (e.g.powering off or deleting bots, AI, etc).And as was identified a few times, the 'death' of information itself, that is deletion or removal, is sorely under explored (Hellmich & Dinneen, 2022).Further studies could investigate and develop guidelines and interfaces for deletion in order to create meaningful digital legacies that can also be sustained by following generations.

| The family level
With a person's passing, the intersection of death and information changes and arguably grows to include more people.There, support is even more rare and further practical requirements are imposed when guidance has not been left by the deceased about how to handle their data or information.There too, research-driven guidance could be useful, but must be no less carefully informed and adapted for different cultures and cases.Significant challenges are evident in the literature: issues of legacy, inheritance, privacy protection, social and psychological aspects of grieving through interactions with data in online environments, and more philosophical and ethical issues of digital immortality and resurrection through data (Goff, 2020;Sisto, 2020).Deliberate actions of a person and wishes expressed through wills or informal conversations affect how bereaved families deal with legacy and inheritance.Legal regulations only go so far due to slow responses to changes in people's (digital) possessions.Information collections pass from one owner to another, often unorganized (or not organized in a way another person can understand), scattered across devices and platforms, and with vague if not incomprehensible context and value, leaving inheritors with a burden of information management and unclear ownership of family (digital) collections (Bellamy et al., 2013a).
The boundaries of personal in personal archives, information, data, and collections blur even more with bereavement practices shifting from individual and physical to collective and online.With this shift, information one creates during life becomes an object of mourning or aid in grieving: social media profiles, email and other accounts, photos and many more.In other words, information used to create one's digital identity can easily take on a life of its own and leave the personal/family domain.The literature discusses the creation and maintenance of digital identities through changed practices of bereavement but more as an unintentional consequence of persisting data and through the lens of the bereaved than as deliberate practices of the dying.The digital dead are growing in number, our experiences with them and their information or data vary wildly (e.g.encountered intentionally or accidentally), and our attitudes toward them are changing too.A gap in exploring what changing practices mean for already existing and unsolved information issues exists.And as sites of memorialization, social media platforms have strengths (e.g.availability) but also key weaknesses (e.g.precarity, privacy abuses); the possibility for something better is an invitation to researchers to identify, plan, implement, and evaluate solutions.When such work involves participants, it should be careful to focus on age only when it is a key factor (else it risks being ageist, badly conceived or both; Hillebrand, 2022) and when older adults are studied it is recommended to do so in collaboration and partnership with them (Manchester & Facer, 2015).

| The institution level
Like families, institutions are affected by the information and data of the dead, for example through donations, which incur similar problems of scale and inscrutability, identity, preservation, reuse, legality, and ethics.Surprisingly, relatively few works in our review touched on the institutional perspective, especially on information institutions (e.g.rather than commercial data holders).There is thus a notable gap in research to explore and address the role of death, digital legacy, and death positivity in information services (Chabot, 2019).Libraries, archives, museums, galleries, and other cultural heritage and memory institutions are well positioned to offer services around digital death, but further research seems to be needed about how those services can best be implemented.
Also notably, policy regarding death and information was barely present in the reviewed literature, and is more or less absent outside scholarly literature today; for example, neither the EU GDPR nor IFLA's statement on data protection explicitly cover the deceased (only in IFLA's statement on historical records are the dead mentioned briefly).This omission is not only an issue for the dead, who require privacy and may not get it, but for the living, who want the dead to have that privacy but need guidance in managing their information.To achieve thanatosensitive information management it is necessary to consider the challenges imposed on information by death and the requirements of both groups of people, and to embed the relevant issues and principles into the policies and practices of information management (including in the afterlife industry; Davoudi, 2022).

| The societal level and beyond
On the societal level, much of the reviewed literature recognizes its focus to be primarily Western-oriented and individualistic, and too little is known about how desires and appropriate solutions differ across people and cultures (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023).Cross-population issues of equity have also been largely unexplored, like those of race (Sutherland, 2023) and access to services, education, and technology (Nemer, 2015;Scheerder et al., 2017).Such issues apply no less to death-and legacy-related matters of information than any other aspect of it.In other words, there is not only a so-called digital divide, but a digital death divide, which must be addressed in both the contents and conduct of future research.That is, it should not only be addressed by targeted research questions, but also improved by a wider perspective and (e.g.) inclusive research collaborations.The reviewed literature also recognizes that online environments can bring together practices across communities and cultures, but that they may conflict (Gach et al., 2017).Clear moral and ethical norms and legal regulations are expected to exist in such environments to help individuals, families, community groups, and the death industry to minimize harm and maximize well-being and support.However, the literature reveals many gaps in this area, especially around legal enforcement and responsibility.
Further omissions of equity topics in the literature surround gender and sexuality, which have been recently identified as important factors in PIM (Cushing & Kerrigan, 2022) and which likely also extend to information and death.Queer people have unique experiences and challenges managing their identity online (Fox & Ralston, 2016;McInroy & Craig, 2015) and extending that management across death and legacy (online or offline) may be similarly unique, for example when managing identity-related data like deadnames and pre-transition images.Death studies scholars have proposed queer death studies (Radomska et al., 2020); we suggest the study of death and information must likewise consider the intersection of equity and identity.
Technology is an enabling factor on all three levels, from individuals, through families, to society broadly.Information is created, shared, experienced and reused through technology, creating technology-augmented death practices.Literature focuses, in particular, on the design features and what they do for the dying and bereaved (Massimi & Charise, 2009).There is a need however, for deeper interdisciplinary exploration of whether technology enables or hinders the grieving process and in what ways proactive design or more informed use of technology can help manage death experience.Today's generations are the first ever to inherit digital collections, and while this has changed what information about the dead is available in the future (Pitsillides, 2016), inter-generational preservation is not yet well-supported by end-user systems (Doyle & Brubaker, 2023).Also, although examinations of the role of AI have begun, there are numerous unanswered questions about thanatosensitive AI design and of incorporation of AI in the death industry.A question remains whether all technology and online spaces should be, by default, thanatosensitive.
Philosophical and ethical issues of digital immortality and resurrection of data, although not the explicit focus of this review, have nonetheless emerged in many studies, and are the sole focus of a growing number of further works.What remains of a human, what does the digital afterlife mean for humankind, and what is sacred online?Notably, discussions about the obligations to preserve the data of the deceased tend to focus on social media platforms, but similar obligations may apply to families and public information institutions (likewise memory or heritage institutions, etc.), and remain to be examined.What must we do, what must we not do (e.g. with inherited information), and what are the limitations of our duties in cases of burdensome last wishes or neglected collections?These questions weave back to the decision-making one should consider in life-and death-related experiences.It is not just a question of can and should digital afterlife exist, but also what responsibility we have toward sustainability.Literature warns against the unconscious and unending accumulation of digital data.How can we, and should we, delete data to prevent accidental accumulation and resource-intensive management of personal data?Perspectives that seem promising for helping to address these questions are information ethics (e.g.Floridi, 2013), which we noted has been used to analyze digital immortality and second death, and ethics of care, which was recently proposed as a theoretical foundation for PIM (Cushing, 2023).
Finally, through addressing information management issues with life and death in mind, information science can promote death positivity in and to the benefit of society, help people prepare and have agency over how they and their data continue to exist in memory (of humans and technology), what legal implications their digital production may have, what remains as heritage.Important privacy issues can be dealt with proactively, such as preventing identity theft, cyber-attacks, and the creation and distribution of harmful content.Death, like life, is an information phenomenon.Too complex of an issue to be solved just through one perspective, the deathand-information intersection reveals the need and potential for interdisciplinary collaboration of all affected and interested

| CONCLUSION
Like information and technology, death is an unavoidable and powerfully determining aspect of human lives.Aiming to understand research on death and information management, we conducted an extensive literature search and review of 293 scholarly publications, which we hope will serve as a helpful starting point for information scholars approaching this important conceptual intersection.
We identified seven topics in the research, and reviewed each.The first covered works on information as a legacy, addressing practices and challenges in creating and inheriting digital legacies and the consideration of the value of such legacies for individuals, families and society.The following topic addressed information needs and information behaviors of the dying and bereaved and pointed out not just what needs people may have in this situation but also less explored aspects of information avoidance the need to promote death positivity.The third topic explored intersections of information and data on the Internet in the context of death, especially how death is becoming increasingly a social phenomenon and how social media and the Internet enable the resurgence of collective grieving, which differs from prevailing Western practices of sequestration (Graham et al., 2015).Closely connected to changing practices online is the thanatosensitive design of technologies, presented in the fourth topic, that enhance death rituals, support the grieving process and enable people to prepare for their own death.Inevitably, ever-persisting data (intentional or not) poses the question of digital immortality and the digital afterlife of personal data and profiles.This issue was presented in the fifth topic.We concluded the review with two topics delving into ethical and legal dimensions of managing information and data after death and in the context of bereavement.Findings in these sections point to many still-existing uncertainties and a lack of clear policies to guide changing norms and behavior.In summary, our synthesis showed that information created and managed during someone's life has implications in several domains: 1. How information represents the deceased individual, whether as a self-directed form of self-representation or as a portrayal through accidentally amassed information.2. How that information is used by the bereaved close contacts, legal inheritors, and other parties with commercial or societal interest in preserving and reusing personal data.
3. How that information persists online (e.g. through footprints, memorials, or bots), creating digital afterlives and posing questions of immortality and resurrection.4. What is the responsibility of each interested stakeholder interacting with information in the context of death and how they approach, ethically use, legally define, sensitively design, culturally understand and manage information in a way that enhances the well-being of individuals and families and shapes future societal death rituals and grieving norms and behaviors.
Understanding these perspectives was invaluable in showing that while there is growing awareness of the value and power information has, that awareness does not transpire at the individual level, and society is currently under-prepared for many emerging issues.Information essentially underpins the right to be remembered as well as the right to be forgotten, and this right extends from individuals to communities.Information science has a lot of potential to contribute to this topic, but doing so requires more systematic and holistic research on information management, and the design of information services with death as well as life in mind is needed.
Chen et al. (2021), exploring how social media users might choose what data to leave behind, found users want to individually select what to keep online but are open to some support from smart assistants, family, and close friends.

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I G U R E 1 Mapping of stakeholder groups and example information management concerns entailed by death, organized by approximate time of occurrence.Background lines are indicative of possible information flows and connections between phenomena.