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Teaching with Primary Sources The Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities |
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Using the Library of Congress to
Advantage to Study The Roaring Twenties Amanda Hudson and Stephanie Zehner |
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For
the Student |
What are Pathfinders and what do they do? A Pathfinder is a strategy for
managing online information. It is an ironic product of the digital age.
Prior to computers and the internet, the availability of information
presented scholars, teachers, and students with major problems of access.
Today, the conditions are reversed. A click of the computer overwhelms us
with access to massive amounts of information. Navigating through massive
digital archives to find the needed document is a great challenge. As the name implies,
pathfinders create routes through the massive collections direct to pertinent
resources. Various pathfinder strategies exist. The option here focuses on
topics and themes. Thematic paths blaze the way through sub-topics to
selected resources to organize online resources of a integral curriculum
topic. The goal is to manage the
millions of digitized documents in the numerous collections of the Library of
Congress web site. What is the Pathfinder
strategy? The strategy is to move from
the general to the specific. Familiar classroom topics comprise an individual
Pathfinder home page while a general theme related to that topic provides
context and structure. A sub-topic connected to the theme serves as the
organizational construct, linked pages from the home page, More detailed
sub-themes from the sub-theme pages serve as the paths to the final
destinations, namely a series of selected documents. The guideline of one document for one day’s instruction serves as the criteria for selection of resources. As a result, the stress is on visuals and brief print resources.
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For
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