If you're not too busy, would you mind blinding me with library science? Infosynth sounds like a useful skill and I'm far too dumb and lazy to go around reinventing the wheel all the time.
it is! unfortunately it’s not really something there is a lazy approach to - the lazy/time-strapped approach here is really to get someone else who has spent the time developing these skills to do infosynth for you: - this is why health librarians are an increasingly important part of healthcare provision, for instance, and it’s what I do as a freelancer for people whose time is at a premium.
it’s also something i have less experience teaching than a lot of other infolit skills; I do think you can really only get good/quick at it with a lot of practice.
but, if you’re interested in learning the good news is there are a lot of free librarian-compiled resources on this and other infolit skills available on the library websites of universities, which are usually accessible without an institutional log in.
Information literacy is the ability to know when information is needed and to be able to identify, locate and evaluate, and then legally and
Here is a decent one with links to some more in depth sources.
These are going to be aimed at an audience of people who are using these skills in an academic context, but the core skills are pretty cross-applicable.
What comes with practice is being able to very quickly evaluate things like
whether this source is worth using (relevant, reputable)
how much of it you need to read,
and how much information you need to save from each source in order to be able to do the synthesis part later without revisiting the source.
(There’s also finding good sources to begin with, but that’s a different skill.)
What is key imo is to start with a well-defined research question, or more informally a good sense of what you’re trying to find out and for what purpose, and who the audience of your synthesis is.
I like to use something like OneTab or Zotero that lets me easily save a bunch of pages that i can go back to later. I also like to do a decent amount of just reading around before i even try to do anything else. It’s important to sorta just get oriented with stuff so that i have the relevant context for making decisions about how i go about it when it comes to doing anything more rigorous.
But ultimately with infosynth you need to be at peace with the fact that you are the one doing the legwork. Yours is the long boring task of somewhat-rigorously locating and reading lots and lots of stuff in order that you might tease out the seeds of a good synthesis.
I hope this helps somewhat; this is one of the domain skills i turned out to be Just Good At and i do think that often makes me worse at teaching things!
if you have any sort of a connection with a university (or work in healthcare) it’s worth checking if tuition in this sort of thing is available to you through your library. Many of the people who have the option to take this up aren’t aware of it. you can sometimes get infolit tuition at public libraries too
