In terms of thinking about what and information need is,
I think it is easiest to think about it in a practical sense.
So think about if you're in a lecture and you suddenly realize that you don't quite
understand the concept or a particular words that your lecture is talking about.
There's an information need there,
to actually get a definition of those kind of terms.
Or you could think about it, that you've got an assignment and
you realize that you don't have the background information to complete it.
You're not sure how to go about researching and
looking for books and journal articles.
So again, there's an information need there.
So you need to know how to go about finding information
as well as actually accessing it to rate and complete your assignment.
So in a simple term I think these
are scenarios all relate to how having an information need.
And essentially, I think it's about you don't have the answer.
However, you're motivated enough that you want to find out the answer and
you want to learn more about something.
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I think it's important to document and
evaluate your search strategy because it's really going to save you time and
help you to efficiently complete your assignment or whatever task it is.
So in terms of documenting your strategy, you will have already thought about your
topic keywords to search and the kind of places you can go and find that material.
So you could look at your course notes,
you could check a search engine like Google, you could go to the library and
look at the online database.
So you could check the catalog for books, you could look, search a database for
journal articles.
So because you're doing searches across a lot of different formats,
it's really useful to document what you do.
So that way you can refined your search and
you haven't forgotten what you've done.
You're not going back and repeating what you've done.
So it's really useful just to write down so
that your search is particular beta database or
you've check your notes and you found this kind of information and you used this kind
of keywords to find, so what you've tried and if you found anything.
And then I think the next step is to actually check individual records.
So if you've found a book record
that's on the library catalog, that you actually have a look at it online.
Or a journal article that you read, you have a quick scan of it online.
And so that way you can see if it's relevant.
So you can rate perhaps the first chapter.
You can look, often records have keywords and
you can see if those keywords are similar to what your topic is.
So that's a really good way to see if they're relevant.
There are some strategies that you can, I mean you can change your strategy.
So for instance, if you start a search and you find you're not getting
relevant information, it may be because your keywords are too broad.
And you're just getting a lot of information.
So you might want to make them more specific.
So you could for instance, instead of searching for
something about education You could search for undergraduate students.
So that's bringing it down and making it very specific.
So you will only get results related to undergraduate students.
So that's a way of narrowing your search.