Terrains of the Information Landscape by Craig Gibson, Libraries, Associate University Librarian for Research, Instructional, and Outreach Services Teachers and librarians should work together to help students understand how to position their topics more productively in a complex information environment. The metaphor of “information landscape” is one way of conveying this complexity, so that students become increasingly sophisticated and intentional about their choices and can make better “moves” within this terrain. The great challenge is to help students understand how to formulate a research question or topic and then position it fruitfully within this information landscape, some parts of which are relatively stable but others which increasingly are unstable, uncertain, and full of many uncertain pathways. Charting a course to collect appropriate information sources in various sectors, especially with a topic that leads across all three of them, requires more imagination on the part of the student, as well as persistence and willingness to suspend judgment about initial search results in order to locate better ones. “Pre-bibliographic Terrain” This is the domain of primary research coming from associations, think tanks, community organizations, and networks of experts. This terrain has existed in the landscape for many years, but the often invaluable information within it is hidden or invisible to many researchers because research results or data are not published or not promoted widely, or because a certain amount of persistence (worthy of an investigative reporter) is essential to ferret out unpublished information. The student who wants data for a paper on charitable giving in Fairfax County, Virginia, will have to learn which local organizations to approach to collect some of this information. The search paths aren’t clear in this part of the landscape, and it requires a certain act of imagination to predict which organization, association, or group of individuals might have the needed research or data. “Bibliographic Terrain” This is the traditional library-based or library-sponsored terrain of catalogs, indexes, databases, reference sources, and other tools. The traditional library-oriented way of teaching research is to show students how to use an array of these resources and tools, connecting them in a “flow chart” or strategy. However, the migration of many of these resources to the online environment has meant both great convenience and great confusion for the uninitiated: which of these resources is authoritative? Are there tools not sponsored by the library that are equally appropriate? Where does one start researching in the online environment, which can produce many dead ends and much frustration for the student? Many students are confused by the hybrid print-and-electronic bibliographic terrain that currently exists, where the library still offers many print reference sources, yet many online reference sources offer the convenience of downloadable citations, abstracts, and fulltext articles, with no sense of relation to the overall flow of research results, findings, and data that have accumulated over time within a discipline or scholarly conversation. The online resources within this “bibliographic terrain” may provide students with a truncated or foreshortened view of how the research process works because of the rapidity with which citations and online articles are retrieved, eliminating the need for students to reflect, to imagine other potential sources for research, or to revision their own research process, just as they need to revision their writing process. “New Content Environments” By now, students and their instructors are familiar with the panoply of Web 2.0 environments—participative, collaborative online spaces in which groups contribute content—the catchphrase is now “user-generated content.” The issues with authority of information described previously in the bibliographic terrain, become compounded many times over in the “New Content Environments” of blogs, wikis, user-produced videos and photographs, open-access publishing, and other environments and formats that see little or none of the peer review found in the traditional bibliographic terrain. These New Content Environments, best exemplified by Wikipedia, are now growing over or supplanting older and legitimate information resources, or perhaps more productively, being grafted onto them (a good example is the practice of social bookmarking or tagging, where the student provides his own indexing terms to help “tag” a resource—a paper, a photograph, a video—and other students can locate the resource using the same term). The world of user-generated content, grafted onto legitimate traditional resources, does produce many questions about appropriateness, authority, currency, and sustainability of information resources; the very instability of this part of the terrain suggests quicksand. Click here to read about the elements of question analysis. |