A sense-making approach for engineering undergraduates to retrieve environmental management information on Bolgoda ecosystem

Abstract

The use of methodologies, practices, and activities are encouraged in engineering education to solve real-world problems for which knowledge generation and information transfer is vital. For this purpose, it is essential to have access to authoritative information as much as possible. Dervin’s sensemaking framework involves a process of seeking, encountering and using the information to address an information need with respect to ambiguous and complex real-world situations. Retrieving information on Bolgoda Ecosystem for the purpose of environmental management was an activity with engineering undergraduate library orientation during the pre-academic term. Accordingly, the students have engaged in a guided literature search to retrieve information from nine resources on a topic of interest from six categories of the Bolgoda Ecosystem. This individual exercise comprising 13 hands-on sessions was designed in line with the sense-making framework and created in MS Form. The results were manually analyzed and evaluated for information retrieval productivity with respect to relevance and document type. The results from 1169 search records revealed that 98.3% have selected a topic relevant to a complex situation and they were able to retrieve 89.5% of appropriate document categories that included 89.9% for books/reports, 90.3% for articles and 87.1% for conference papers. It was also observed that Google Books, ScienceDirect database and the Institutional Repository of Moratuwa University have been mostly accessed for document retrieval. The productive use of sense-making theory for information retrieval during a library orientation is evident from this study. Also, it can be recommended as a tool to educate library users on effective information systems and designing new information systems. This enabled the fresh engineering undergraduates to engage in evidence-based decision-making and rational thinking to develop environmental awareness on a sensitive ecosystem.