information search behavior of students at postgraduate
Aims:
• To develop skills in:
o refining a topic or question;
o acquiring information from specific information resources through planned strategies;
o citing different kinds of material correctly;
o evaluating and presenting material;
o writing in different modes: critical summary (in annotations) and reflective writing.
• To develop your own information literacy and develop your understanding of information literacy as a concept.

The coursework consists of two parts: an individual annotated bibliography and a reflective report. Both parts must be submitted. The annotated bibliography is worth 50% of the marks awarded for this assignment; and the reflective report 50%.
The coursework entails doing a literature search on a topic. You have been allocated to either Sheila Webber or Pam McKinney (see list at the end of this document). You will negotiate the topic with Sheila or Pam, starting in the week 2 session. Whoever you are allocated to will be the person who marks the assignment.
They have identified some broader topic areas to choose from and you will negotiate a narrower (more specific) topic within the following topics. The broader topics for negotiation are:
1. Use of Web 2.0/ Web 3.0 (e.g. blogs, social media, microblogs) in marketing (to focus on a particular sector/ country/ particular type of Web 2.0; n.b. this may focus on marketing libraries, but it does not have to focus on libraries)
2. Continuing Professional Development (in any profession, of your choice)
3. Teaching information literacy (in a specific subject (e.g. engineering), or to a specific population (e.g. senior citizens) of your choice)
4. Information behaviour (of a particular population e.g. children, humanities academics, lawyers)

Note:
• No two people can do exactly the same specific topic

Details of the two pieces of work
1. An annotated bibliography, presented as if for a client (Pam or Sheila). You should present 12 items (no more and no less) that you consider, together, best answer your search question, with annotations as described below. No word count or abstract is required for this section.
Your bibliography should also include several different kinds of publication – at least one website, at least one academic journal article, and at least one book – though the balance of material would depend on the topic.
Please note: you are expected to include the Dialog Proquest online service as one of the search tools you use. You should evaluate your strategy with Dialog along with the other tools used in the reflective report (below). This does not mean that you must use information sources located in Dialog, but if Dialog did not prove useful, you should explain how/why. You will be learning about Dialog later in the semester. 2

Each annotation should give an explanation of why the source is relevant to the search question & what in particular it contributes to the bibliography. Each annotation should only be a few sentences long.
2. A reflective report of your experience of, and development in, information literacy whilst undertaking this exercise,, concentrating on the SCONUL “7 pillars of information literacy”; focusing on the pillars “Identify”, “Plan” and “Evaluate”.
Word count: 750 words excluding title, reference list and appendices. No abstract is required.
Description: You must reflect on key aspects of the search task required for this Inf6350 assignment. Give examples where appropriate e.g. you might describe your exact search strategy in different search engines and databases for the “Plan” pillar. You should cover the pillars “Identify”, “Plan”, and “Evaluate”, but the sections do not have to be of equal length. You will need to demonstrate that you:
• understand the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of information literacy,
• are able to identify your own strengths and weaknesses,
• can assess your development in information literacy from the start of the Inf6350 module,
• can use evidence and examples to justify your opinions and evaluations.

The relevant pillars are listed below, with prompts of some questions that you might address:
“Identify”
• How did you go about identifying and developing a topic for this assignment, within the subject areas given by your tutor?
• How did you interact with your tutor to negotiate the topic and check that you were progressing in the right direction? Do you know whether the tutor was satisfied with this interaction?
• Did your perception of your information need change at all over the duration of the assignment? If so – why, and how?

“Plan”
Note that you should include detailed examples of your search strategy in at least two different information sources, one of which should be Dialog (for example, Google and Dialog), as evidence of what you did. Put these in Appendices (see below). In the report itself concentrate on explaining how you planned , why you adopted particular strategies, comparing strategies with different sources and what you think the evidence (in the Appendices) says about your planning and strategy skills. Questions include:
• What planning did you engage in regarding exactly how you were going to search the different sources?
• How did you translate the “information need” into actual search strategies? Did these differ across the different search tools you used?
• How effective was your strategy with each source? How might it have been improved?
• Did you plan for acquiring information in ways other than searching (e.g. through monitoring and encountering)

“Evaluate”
• How did you go about extracting what was relevant from the sources you retrieved? How did you decide what to include and what to reject?
• How did you address issues relating to possible bias in your sources?
3

Development in information literacy
You should conclude your report by:
• summing up how you think you have been particularly successful, and where you did not do so well, in this task,
• identifying whether you have developed your information literacy through this assignment.
• noting any priorities for development of your IL in the future.

Reference list (not included in word count) Note that it is not expected that you would have many references for this part of the assignment.
Appendices (not included in word count)
The appendices should include examples of your strategy with at least two different sources. For example, you might include key screenshots that showed how you searched and add a few sentences that explain what is in the screenshots. The examples do not have to be digital: for example, if one of the sources is a library, you might list the steps you went through to identify relevant material in the bookstock, including examining the chosen book(s).