Sunday, May 18, 2008

Pathfinders

In my current course in Library School, Special Topics in Digital Reference, one of our assignments is creating Pathfinders for the Internet Public Library. Pathfinder is another word for subject guides which help the user find information or resources related to a particular subject.

I have chosen to update one pathfinder on Celtic Culture and develop two new ones: Choosing a cat or kitten and Finding Mystery Novels. I think that the current Celtic Culture pathfinder is well-organized by needs to be updated because many of the links are currently broken or the website has not been updated in the last few years.

The research for "Choosing a cat or kitten" has been pretty straightforward--there are so many good and active organizations that have published guidelines for choosing a cat. I even found one that includes a strategy for choosing a cat from a shelter with pretty specific guidelines for identifying the cat with the personality that you seek.

The mystery pathfinder is great fun to research but organizing it is another issue. There are so many types of mysteries and some many sites to choose from. Right now, I am listing them and annotating the websites but it will be interesting to go back and figure out the best method for organizing it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's great that you were able to use your interest in cats to create a pathfinder!

For a Resources in Young Adults class, I had to create a pathfinder and I thought about using cats as a subject. However, the library that I used (the one I worked at) had a very small amount of books on felines.

Therefore, I wound up doing my assignment on women's suffrage. It worked out well, though.