Welcome to Pathways to Knowledge!

Pathways to Knowledge is a model that represents the information-seeking process you go through when you are looking for information to answer questions, complete an assignment, or just explore something you're curious about. The process can be very direct and simple or it can be very complex—a lot depends on the questions you're trying to answer or the problem you need to solve.

The Pathways Model is like a roadmap for navigating through the information-seeking process. Sometimes you will take one path, sometimes another—how you find, analyze and use information depends on many things including how you learn, the resources you have available, your task, and what you may already know about your topic.

There are six Stages in Pathways: Appreciation, Presearch, Search, Interpretation, Communication, and Evaluation. This tutorial explains the Stages and all the strategies you might choose to use. It's important to know you may not always use all the Stages or follow them in the same order, and that you should be thinking about appreciation and evaluation all through the process.