Teaching with Primary Sources

The Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities

A Pathfinder is a strategy for managing online information. It is an ironic product of the digital age. Prior to computers and the internet, the availability of information presented scholars, teachers, and students with major problems of access. Today, the conditions are reversed. A click of the computer overwhelms us with access to massive amounts of information. Navigating through massive digital archives to find the needed document is a great challenge.

As the name implies, pathfinders create routes through the massive collections direct to pertinent resources. Various pathfinder strategies exist. The option here focuses on topics and themes. Thematic paths blaze the way through sub-topics to selected resources to organize online resources of a integral curriculum topic.

The goal is to manage the millions of digitized documents in the numerous collections of the Library of Congress web site.

What is the Pathfinder strategy?

The strategy is to move from the general to the specific. Familiar classroom topics comprise an individual Pathfinder home page while a general theme related to that topic provides context and structure. A sub-topic connected to the theme serves as the organizational construct, linked pages from the home page, More detailed sub-themes from the sub-theme pages serve as the paths to the final destinations, namely a series of selected documents.

The guideline of one document for one day’s instruction serves as the criteria for selection of resources. As a result, the stress is on visuals and brief print resources.