Information Pathways

A Problem-Solving Approach to Information Literacy

By (author) Crystal Fulton

Paperback - £56.00

Publication date:

23 March 2010

Length of book:

154 pages

Publisher

Scarecrow Press

ISBN-13: 9780810874268

With the advent of the Information Society, access to resources is vital to the ordinary citizen, the academic, and the career professional, as well as in public administration and private enterprise. Information Pathways: A Problem-Solving Approach to Information Literacy is designed to serve as a textbook for courses that address the need of college students to develop a basic knowledge of the complex matrix of core resources for the retrieval, management, and exploitation of information. This book shows students how to:

•Build effective search strategies for solving information problems
•Evaluate and use information and information sources
•Apply information skills to the writing process
•Be at ease with numeric information
•Integrate information skills for smooth problem solving
•Maintain their new fluency with information

Organized into chapters that examine different ways in which information is structured, Information Pathways will help students develop and evaluate strategies for finding and adopting information.
Fulton (Sch. of Information & Library Studies, Univ. Coll., Dublin) presents a straightforward guide to conducting research and becoming information literate. Encapsulating several library school courses...it's a good vehicle for explaining library research to novice library users in high school and college settings. Divided into 11 chapters, the book addresses factual information, how to research writing, numeric literacy, and other information-literacy topics. Each chapter starts with an introduction and specific learning objectives before moving on to manageable chunks of information. There are also quotes and diagrams throughout to emphasize the details. What makes Fulton's book effective is the inclusion of exercises-this moves the content from theory to practice. A useful tool for semester-long info lit courses or as a quick reference for students already familiar with the basics of research.