To pay homage to the American tradition of Halloween, I thought I’d write something about trick-or-treaters combined with finding the right path to information or in this case chocolates or lollies.

I was on Twitter last night and one of my NLS6 committee colleagues posted something about getting 22 kids at her door trick-or-treating. Amazing! Compared that to our 1 in the past six years. I’m thinking this is due to the fact that we have a gate at the front that stops them from coming up or maybe kids just don’t follow this tradition in Tasmania. I don’t know! But it got me thinking how we could apply this to finding our own topic pathfinders.

When we look for information on a particular subject or topic, what most of us do is go to a search engine like Google and type a known keyword and hope that we ‘find’ what we’re looking for amongst thousands of choices. Wouldn’t it be better if we already know where to find information on a particular subject? This is why we need pathfinders. They are people that discover or show others a way to find what they’re looking for. Libraries and Information centres are great pathfinders. So if I wanted to do a research on chocolates (of all topics!) I would normally go to my local library’s website and type in a keyword in its search box. It will then give me a list of all their resources with options to refine search.

Similarly, if I was looking for some chocolates to eat when trick-or-treating I’d certainly go straight to my colleague’s house rather than mine. Wouldn’t you?