Skill Acquisition: The Curious Case of Information Searching.

This paper identifies two important themes in a consideration of skill acquisition in information studies. First, the means by which students, in general, acquire competency in transferable skills such as information retrieval and information searching. Second, how information searching is a special ability that is facilitated by new technologies, such as hypermedia/server/client information systems along with knowledge elicitation and representation techniques. Following a discussion of a generalizable framework for skill acquisition, the paper considers information need—from a transferable skills perspective. The use of knowledge elicitation techniques such as graphical browsers is emphasized. The paper highlights the distinction between discovering and revealing tacit knowledge. The paper concludes with a discussion of recent work on using Multi-dimensional Scaling and other scaling techniques such as Pathfinder (PFNet) algorithms to uncover tacit knowledge in pre paration for information searching. The paper includes a number of recommendations on the way information need—as a transferable skill—can be facilitated in information studies courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]