Entering Unfamiliar Territory

Abstract

There has been a long-standing interest within academic librarian community to provide support for graduate students involved in interdisciplinary research. This column focuses on challenges that researchers face when seeking information in an unfamiliar disciplinary area as well as what is known about information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers. Using a framework of information seeking strategies, elements of a course for interdisciplinary graduate students are proposed. Topics that are addressed are learning about culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; including scholarly communication apparatus and organization of information; mechanisms for identifying and locating key authors, publications, research institutions, and emerging research fronts; how to determine when enough information has been gathered; and keeping up with latest research.--Editor Given increase in number and interest in interdisciplinary programs and research in U.S. institutions of higher education, academic librarians should be involved in determining information literacy needs of graduate students in interdisciplinary areas. (1) Don Spanner expresses this need in his published study of a group of interdisciplinary researchers: Is it solely domain of scholars? What is trickle down effect on students as curriculum shifts to encompass interdisciplinarity? Such a determination would allow reference librarians to consider importance of developing necessary bibliographic instructional skills to support both scholars and students in their research. (2) Recent studies of information needs and behavior of interdisciplinary researchers, including graduate students, demonstrate that researchers have difficulties discovering authoritative information sources when venturing outside their major field of study. (3) What approaches have librarians and information scientists found for teaching graduate students about developing vocabularies and learning about core information sources outside of their main disciplinary domains? This article attempts to answer this question by first exploring information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers and difficulties they face in locating key sources of information outside their disciplines. From this review and analysis, information literacy instruction approaches are proposed for creating a course for interdisciplinary graduate students on following topics: learning about culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; how new research is communicated and made accessible to others; identifying and locating key authors, publications, and research institutions through chaining, or footnote chasing; probing activities to increase breadth of information gathered through searching multidisciplinary databases and federated search products; networking; keeping up with research literature; and integration and consolidation of interdisciplinary knowledge. CHALLENGES OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Lynn Westbrook describes interdisciplinary research as the purposeful weaving together of two or more disciplines that are usually considered to be quite unconnected in order to reach a new understanding, create a new academic end product or advance research on a particular question. (4) From an extensive literature review of issues facing interdisciplinary researchers, themes that emerged are need to learn language and culture of discipline, information-scatter issue for highly distributed research areas, nature and quality of bibliographic apparatuses to search for information, and keeping up with current research. For interdisciplinary researchers, there is a need to become familiar with cultural assumptions, language, and organization of knowledge in other discipline. (5) Being able to communicate with those outside one's own discipline requires knowledge of vocabulary of discipline. …