[MUSIC] In terms of thinking about what and information need is, I think it is easiest to think about it in a practical sense. So think about if you're in a lecture and you suddenly realize that you don't quite understand the concept or a particular words that your lecture is talking about. There's an information need there, to actually get a definition of those kind of terms. Or you could think about it, that you've got an assignment and you realize that you don't have the background information to complete it. You're not sure how to go about researching and looking for books and journal articles. So again, there's an information need there. So you need to know how to go about finding information as well as actually accessing it to rate and complete your assignment. So in a simple term I think these are scenarios all relate to how having an information need. And essentially, I think it's about you don't have the answer. However, you're motivated enough that you want to find out the answer and you want to learn more about something. [MUSIC] I think it's important to document and evaluate your search strategy because it's really going to save you time and help you to efficiently complete your assignment or whatever task it is. So in terms of documenting your strategy, you will have already thought about your topic keywords to search and the kind of places you can go and find that material. So you could look at your course notes, you could check a search engine like Google, you could go to the library and look at the online database. So you could check the catalog for books, you could look, search a database for journal articles. So because you're doing searches across a lot of different formats, it's really useful to document what you do. So that way you can refined your search and you haven't forgotten what you've done. You're not going back and repeating what you've done. So it's really useful just to write down so that your search is particular beta database or you've check your notes and you found this kind of information and you used this kind of keywords to find, so what you've tried and if you found anything. And then I think the next step is to actually check individual records. So if you've found a book record that's on the library catalog, that you actually have a look at it online. Or a journal article that you read, you have a quick scan of it online. And so that way you can see if it's relevant. So you can rate perhaps the first chapter. You can look, often records have keywords and you can see if those keywords are similar to what your topic is. So that's a really good way to see if they're relevant. There are some strategies that you can, I mean you can change your strategy. So for instance, if you start a search and you find you're not getting relevant information, it may be because your keywords are too broad. And you're just getting a lot of information. So you might want to make them more specific. So you could for instance, instead of searching for something about education You could search for undergraduate students. So that's bringing it down and making it very specific. So you will only get results related to undergraduate students. So that's a way of narrowing your search. Another way of doing it is if you're not getting enough information, maybe you need to make your search terms more general. So maybe you're looking for something in Australia and maybe that's too broad and it's not getting very many results. You could be more specific and just search for material related to New South Wales. So it's about changing the parameters. Of your search depending on your results. And really I just recommend it's about trying and doing that. Because sometimes it can be trial and error the first time you use particular applications. So then finally, I think once you've thought and you've refined your search in various ways, you can start thinking about, well Do I want the most recent material? So I might want to limit by date range. You might only want to find materials, so journal articles that are full text online, and that you don't actually have to go and find the actual physical, Journal in the library. So you can limit in various ways and that will help you to refine your strategy. [MUSIC] Thinking about your search strategy, it's really useful to think about how you're going to manage your time. So at university you will have a lot of competing courses and assessments to do. So it's really important to use your time effectively. So I get asked about this all the time with students, so I think it's really important to remember what your actual assignment or your task is. So if you only have to find three articles, then spend the time searching, as soon as you have found what you think are your relevant three articles stop, because it's very easy to keep looking for better and better sources. However, you have a time limit. And thinking about that, it's also really useful to think about how much is your assessment worth? So if it's worth 10%, maybe you're not going to spend so much time on that compared to if you have an assignment that's worth 50%. So in terms of managing your time, I think it's really useful to think about those tips. [MUSIC]
