Kuhlthau’s work is award-winning, highly-cited, and more often included in LIS courses than any other information behavior model (VanScoy, Julien,& Harding, in press). Given its success, why make or watch a video about it? Do landmark papers of Information Science that are already shining in their own light really need a multimedia makeover? Put differently: What’s the point of these Information Science videos anyways?  My post this week answers the latter question with examples from the video at hand, and argues that well-crafted educational videos provide otherwise missed avenues of learning and present concepts in more rounded and complete ways. For example:

• Biography that Brings Scholars to Life. The video opens with a biographical profile of Dr. Kuhlthau that is more current and richer than the short biography within any paper or book. Many students obtain information degrees to pursue a second career and may appreciate that she worked for years as a school librarian, coming to doctoral studies only later. The video includes a snippet of Dr. Kuhlthau speaking about the ISP that is uplifting evidence of her authority, integrity, passion, and vision.

• A Long View of Trends in the Literature and Field. Any retrospective of a landmark publication (multimedia or otherwise) has the opportunity for historical perspective. To that end, my video locates the ISP in theoretical developments within the literature and field over the last 50 years. Having focused on documents and information systems for most of its formative years, in the 1980s Information Science took a “cognitive turn,” (Hartel, 2019), and research was re-centered on the information seeker. Kuhlthau’s humanistic study was a cornerstone of this sea change. Nowadays, research from the once-dominant cognitive paradigm is often dismissed as overly mentalistic and insensitive to context. However, the dynamic and unfolding nature of video allows us to see concepts like the ISP as bridges to the more socially and culturally sensitive frameworks we embrace today.

• A Paper’s Organization. The What Makes This Paper Great? video series bring attention to the featured work’s organization and rhetorical strategy. A segment of the video at hand entitled “Structure of the Paper,” analyzes Kuhlthau’s 1989 article at the thumbnail and paragraph level, giving viewers a high-level, narrated tour. This way, learners can understand the conceptual work performed in each section of the document, enhancing comprehension. (I also believe that these lessons in document organization help readers to become better writers. Doctoral students who aspire to write conceptual papers can especially benefit from these explications.) Several educators who have used What Makes This Paper Great? series in their courses have applauded its unique emphasis on the structure of documents.

• Complex Theoretical Influences Can Be Illustrated. Among her contributions to Information Science, Kuhlthau applied George Kelly’s theory of personality to the information seeking context. The video at hand illustrates her interdisciplinary translation if that idea and shows how personal constructs influence behavior. The dynamic nature of personal constructs lends itself well to the video format. This is a case in which a (motion) picture is worth a thousand words.

• Static Models Can Be Animated and Humanized. Kuhlthau’s ISP model was crystallized and presented as a table that appears centrally in the original paper. An arrow along its X-axis represents a student information-seeker’s path of experience. Though this now-famous graphic design captures the ISP’s key elements, it unfortunately has a static quality and renders the information seeker somewhat abstract and invisible. The video animates and humanizes the Information Search Process, with particular attention to its most innovative affective dimension.

• Videos Enable a Public Conversation. Videos posted on YouTube contain a public space for comments. This feature allows for additional inputs and reveals the social construction of ideas. Recently, Dr. Leslie Maniotes, Kuhlthau’s collaborator (and an accomplished researcher and educational consultant in her own right) watched the video and submitted a lengthy comment. Dr. Maniote’s expressed her appreciation and pointed to additional learning resources, such as the book Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services (Kuhlthau, 2004). She also noted that Nilo Sarraf (a “Neuro Information Scientist”) has recently used EEG imaging to document the ISP in new ways. Thank you, Dr. Maniotes, for enriching the conversation.

To recap, I believe that well-crafted educational videos provide otherwise missed avenues of learning and present concepts in the more rounded and complete ways, delineated above.

I’ll end this post with a round-up of YouTube resources on Kuhlthau and the Information Search Process. Two exemplar presentations (here and here) are made by college librarians and speak to applications of the ISP in a school context. Dr. Nilo Sarraf, mentioned above, hosts an interview with Dr. Kuhlthau about the ISP’s development. On INFIDEOS you can also find a Tiny Video on the ISP, and Kuhlthau’s work is included within The Crossroads of INFORMATION & LOVE, How Do I Write a Conceptual Paper, Information Behavior, and Turn, Turn, Turn. My personal favorite overview of the ISP is a video-recording of a guest lecture by Kuhlthau herself, which captures her genius. The latter should inspire all Information Scientists—going forward—to document their ideas in video.