Unintended consequences of having too much

Not money, but information.

". . .we have found that no matter where students are enrolled, no matter what information resources they may have at their disposal, and no matter how much time they have, the abundance of information technology and the proliferation of digital information resources make conducting research uniquely paradoxical: Research seems to be far more difficult to conduct in the digital age than it did in previous times." Project Information Literacy Progress Report, Feb. 2009

I used to teach research skills and methods--whether it was called BI (bibliographic instruction), User Education, or graduate research seminar. Here was my method. Begin with a wide survey using tertiary sources (textbooks, essays, encyclopedias), narrow and redefine your topic, move on to secondary sources (bibliographies, databases), further refine, then tackle the primary sources (original research). What I didn't usually include in my lectures and handouts is that I myself never used that method. Oh, I suppose if you assigned me a topic on how to hit a golf ball, I might read up on it first, but for my own self-selected topics, I started with my own conclusion then worked backwards to justify it. If it had to be changed along the way, so be it; if not, I was happy. Then I relied as a fallback on serendipity--those items I might have on my office shelves, or which spoke to me ("here I am, take a look") as I wandered through the stacks in a particular call number range. One of my most successful projects, from which I got a number of published articles and which lead to further research, was a box of my grandmother's scrapbook clippings and a box of handwritten index cards for my grandparents' library. That pushed me into all kinds of areas about 19th century publishing, church history, serials and farm magazines, and reading patterns of rural people.

The only time I really relied heavily on information technology to write and publish an article was in writing about how to do it, and I tracked what I did to prepare for a speech at a conference (even where I was and how long it took to receive off campus material) and then wrote about it. It helped me in my teaching, however, I've since forgotten what it was I wrote about.

Research--it's tough to explain to people who don't do it or like it.