About the IIFE Model 

The librarians at Helmke Library have developed a dynamic Web site that we call the Integrated Information Foraging Environment or IIFE Web. The library's IIFE Web site is a virtual landscape in which IPFW students, faculty, and staff can expect to encounter high-quality information resources and tools designed to improve their foraging success.

The Information Literacy Tool Kits site within the IIFE Web presents a teaching-learning environment aimed at students and their instructors. The Information Literacy Tool Kits reassemble Helmke Library's wealth of resources and tools within a self-guided framework for exploration and discovery that builds information literacy skills.

As an instructional model, the IIFE Web and the Information Literacy Tool Kits promote IPFW's two-tiered Librarian-Faculty Information Literacy Partnership and our eight Information Literacy Proficiencies, all designed to teach IPFW students to become self-sufficient, life-long learners and successful information foragers.

Being an Informavore

The IIFE instructional model assumes that people seeking usable information behave a lot like humans or animals seeking food resources. Food foragers, like information foragers, aim to conserve energy, reduce risk and opportunity costs, and maximize the return on their investment of time and effort. They want to find resources fast, and consume only the ones that appear most profitable.

The effort of dealing with hard-to-handle resources leads many foragers to select only a narrow range of resources. This least-effort instinct (accepting the first items that come your way) is rational, and widespread. But when quality of information matters, the least-effort approach can lead to disaster. It pays to understand the foraging environment, so wise decisions can be made about what to pursue, what to ignore, and when to forage in another habitat.

Becoming a Skilled Information Hunter-Gatherer

We encourage novices to think of themselves sometimes as hunters, trying out deliberate strategies (like keyword searches of online databases) in their active search for and pursuit of information. Other times, we point out that it is more rewarding to behave like a gatherer, positioned in the flow of information and waiting for the right item to come along (as often happens in browsing the shelves, or reading the latest issue of a high-quality periodical, or chatting with colleagues). Hunting or gathering approaches can both work well, depending on environmental conditions and the skills of the individual.

Learn more about being an informavore (Miller 1983, Chalmers 2000) and how scholars behave as subsistence foragers (Sandstrom 1994, 1999), and soon these principles of information foraging will seem perfectly natural.

Increasing Encounter Rates with the Best Resources

The IIFE Web aims to deliver resources suited to the different stages of information foraging. Some of these resources target the instructors of beginning students. Others are aimed at novice information foragers themselves. All are designed to help students develop and enhance their repertoire of foraging skills and information literacy proficiencies.

The IIFE Web toolbox of resources includes services and contacts centered in Helmke Library and extending beyond the library's boundaries. These services and contacts are people at IPFW who can help students search for valuable information and use it wisely.

Resources also include a vast array of guides and tools to make information foraging more enjoyable and rewarding. The librarians at IPFW regularly produce and update these guides and tools, and we have new ones on the way.

We also offer resources that describe characteristic environments and behaviors that savvy foragers can explore on their own or in the company of others. We have designed these resources to clarify how information and knowledge are created and validated by experts in scholarly disciplines. We try to highlight the behaviors that succeed in constantly changing information environments. There are many more resources in the planning.

The staff at Helmke Library wish you success and offer our assistance. Begin your foray today!

The IIFE Components Matrix

Link to our IIFE Integrated Information Foraging Environment Components Matrix (PDF) to view how the IIFE Web components relate to the eight information literacy proficiencies promoted in Helmke Library's instructional program.

References Cited

Chalmers, Rachel. "Surf Like a Bushman (You are Now an Informavore)." New Scientist 168 (November 11, 2000): 38-41. (Periodicals Q1 .N52)

An interview with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card about their work on Internet searching behavior, with a inset box about Helmke Library's contributions to understanding scholarly information foragers.

Miller, George A. "Informavores." In The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, edited by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield, pp. 111-13. Wiley, 1983. (Stacks Z665 .S826 1983)

Defines an "informavore" as an entity whose "mind survives by ingesting information." This classic collection of essays provides a grounding in the economics of knowledge production and distribution. The ideas of these contributors have influenced developments in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, informatics, hypertext and the Web, and many other enterprises.

Sandstrom, Pamela Effrein. "Scholars as Subsistence Foragers." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 25 (February-March 1999): 17-20.

A brief overview of the dynamic relationships among scholars, information resources, and their bibliographic microhabitats, reporting findings of a study of scholarly information foraging in the specialty of human behavioral ecology.

Sandstrom, Pamela Effrein. "An Optimal Foraging Approach to Information Seeking and Use." Library Quarterly 64 (1994): 414-49.

A longer discussion of the applications of optimal foraging theory, developed by biologists and anthropologists to explain resource use in natural environments, to understand how people seek (or safely ignore) relevant resources in their information environments.