1 The world of engineering information – 10 points to survive Thomas Hapke www.tu-harburg.de/b/hapke/ hapke@tu-harburg.de University Library of the Hamburg University of Technology October 26, 2004 Point 1: Be aware of your information behavior. Information literacy is a crucial key skill for self-directed learning in scholarly and professional everyday life. In addition to efficient retrieval and navigation strategies information literacy includes - above all - the creativity to organize and shape your own information process in a conscious and demand-oriented way. For the searcher it is not longer questionable to find some information, but to filter reliable information out of a lot of similar offers. Every subject has its own special information media and also particular retrieval strategies to meet the subject- related information needs. The so-called "invisible web" or “deep web” contains information sources which are not collected by most search engines like Google. For example it includes the content of special databases e.g. for patents, websites secured by password access or only available in an intranet as well as script-based websites, which offer dynamic content. There is a whole range of reasons for reading and informing for research: To give you ideas and enhance your creativity, to understand and be able to effectively criticize what other researchers have done in your subject, to broaden your perspective and view your work in context to others (direct personal experience is never enough), to legitimate your arguments, to avoid double efforts in research, to learn more about research methods and their application in practice, and to find new areas for research (Blaxter et al., 2001). Before beginning to search information reflect on your topic and specific information need, gather background information and focus your research. Point 2: Use tutorials, subject gateways and literature guides to inform yourself about searching information There are a lot of tutorials on the net to improve your information skills. DISCUS (Developing Information Skills & Competence for University Students) is an example of a web-based bilingual (German, English) learning tutorial for information literacy in engineering which can be used independent of time and space. DISCUS was developed at the University Library of the Hamburg University of Science and Technology and is offered at http://discus.tu-harburg.de. An American example is the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) at http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu.