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Navigating Your Library

A Roadmap to Available Resources

The Information Timeline

A line with origin point labeled event. points along the line are labeled days, weeks, months and years moving to the right.

The information timeline, or the information cycle, is a way to talk about how the information available on a topic changes over time. Consider information produced in the days, weeks, months, and years after an event occurs. These sources have very different characteristics.

Choose an event and think about the sources created in the days, weeks, months, and years after that event happened.

  • What kinds of sources (newspaper articles, journal articles, books, movies, etc.) are produced in each stage?
  • What are constraints that prevent us from seeing some information sooner?
  • Who is producing information at each stage?
  • What is the purpose of the information?
  • What kinds of sources are contemporary to the event?

Thinking through these questions helps us understand what we are likely to find as we begin our research. Of course, there are exceptions, and sources will vary based on the event and when it occurred.