The Research Dive

Then I ask: when you hear that word, research, what comes to mind? What words? What feelings?

They stare at me.

This is the moment I’ve come to love. The stare is not blankness. It’s the residue of years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, that knowledge is something that happens to you. That researchers are people in lab coats, people with credentials, people who already know things. Not them. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

I wait.

Then, words come from the students: Overwhelm. Anxiety. I don’t even know where to start. There’s just too much.

I say: Right? Ugh. These are accurate. Real, true words. How about something a little more on the positive side?

More silence. So I make it a little concrete: When you first got this assignment, what made you choose your topic?

And then something shifts. I wanted to know more about it. I was curious. It happened to someone in my family. I’ve never seen it studied before.

There it is. The wonder. The engine.

I say: Let’s hold onto all of it, for a second. Both the overwhelm and the curiosity, together.  Research studies have told us that these feelings are part of the research journey. They’re not obstacles. They’re signals. The anxiety is telling you something. Maybe the topic is too big still, maybe you’ve hit the edge of your vocabulary, maybe you need to back up and get your bearings. The curiosity is telling you something too: follow that thread. There’s a live wire there. Learning to read your own feelings while you research—that’s a skill. That’s metacognition. And it matters quite a lot.

What I don’t always say, but what I mean very much: we’ve all been taught that our feelings have no place in academic work. That the goal is to transcend them, to arrive at detached, affectless rigor. But we’ve been following our curiosity and wonder this whole time without knowing that’s what we were doing. I’m just calling it, inviting it back into the room. I’m telling you, dear students, that the thing you thought you had to leave at the door is actually your compass.

Here is what I know about my IL instruction colleagues: they do this too.

Maybe not in these exact words. Maybe without the Kuhlthau citation or the explicit metacognition frame. But in offices and classrooms and reference desks across this profession, librarians are doing something that our professional slogans have completely failed to describe.

We do not help people find the right answer. That framing was already weak and inaccurate. It is now actively counterproductive. It locates our expertise in storage, in knowing where things are, which was a defensible claim when knowing where things were was genuinely scarce. That scarcity is gone. The answer machine problem is solved, and it was not solved by us.

What we actually do is something else entirely.

We help people figure out what they’re actually looking for.

We help them get acquainted with their information environment before they commit to a direction.

We teach them that the first search is not a retrieval operation. It’s a sensing operation. What is the database telling you? What are the subject headings clustering around? What does a result count of 47,000 tell you about the words you chose, and what does a result count of 3 tell you? Notice the URLs. Notice what authors keep appearing. Notice what subjects are attached. This is what I call environmental acquaintanceship: learning the feel of a terrain before you try to navigate it.

We teach them to hold their questions loosely at the beginning. Not because the question doesn’t matter, but because the question will get better if you let it breathe. The research dive is not about finding sources. It’s about learning what kind of knowledge exists in this space, who produces it, where it lives, what the fault lines are. You are not retrieving. You are orienting. These are completely different cognitive tasks.

And evaluation—real evaluation—doesn’t begin when you’ve found an information object. It begins in the head of the researcher, in the question that’s forming or half-formed or not yet formed at all. CRAAP tests and lateral reading and all the frameworks we’ve built are better than nothing, but they still locate evaluation at the object. They’re scarcity-era logic in glut-era clothing. They assume you’ve found the thing; now assess it. But if you haven’t interrogated the question first—if you haven’t asked what am I actually trying to know, and what would count as evidence for that—then you’re evaluating the wrong things with great rigor.

The information environment we work in now is not the one that built our professional identity. We built our slogans, our credentialing logic, our self-understanding in a scarcity environment. Find the thing. Know where it is. Control access to it. The library as vault, the librarian as key-holder.

We are now in a glut environment. The epistemological demands have inverted. The problem is no longer finding—it’s discriminating, orienting, questioning. It’s recognizing that more results is not the same as more clarity. It’s often the opposite.

In a glut environment, the librarian’s expertise doesn’t disappear. It becomes more necessary. But only if we reframe around the new conditions rather than defending the old ones. Only if we stop claiming we find the right answer and start naming what we actually do: we help researchers become artisans of inquiry.

Artisans of inquiry.

I want to sit with that for a moment because I think it’s the most precise description I’ve found for what a researcher actually is, what we’re actually trying to cultivate in a one-shot session, in a research consultation, in a semester-long relationship with a student.

An artisan works with materials. They develop a feel for them over time. They know when something is off before they can explain why. They adjust. They stay in dialogue with what they’re making. And crucially—this is the part that matters—the artisan is changed by the making. The question you end with is not the question you started with. The researcher who completes a research dive is different from the one who began it. That transformation is not a byproduct. It is the point.

This is also what makes inquiry irreducibly human. Not because machines cannot retrieve or synthesize or even generate. These days, they most definitely can, and they do it faster than we can. But because a machine has no stake in the question. A machine is not changed by the finding. It brings no self to the inquiry that gets reshaped in the encounter with the material. It cannot feel the thing that my students felt when they said I was curious or it happened to someone in my family. It cannot follow wonder. It can simulate the output of wonder without the thing itself.

Paolo Freire would recognize all of this. His critique of the banking model—deposit information into passive recipients, then call it education—is a critique of the denial of humanness. What I’m describing is the opposite: inquiry as the practice of becoming more fully human, more fully a subject rather than an object of someone else’s knowledge production. The artisan of inquiry is the antithesis of the banking model student. They’re not receiving. They’re making. And the making is how they claim their own intellectual life.

This hits differently in an Ethnic Studies classroom. These are students whose communities have historically been objects of inquiry. Studied, categorized, explained by outsiders. Teaching them to be artisans of inquiry is not just pedagogy. It is a political act. It is saying: you get to ask the questions. You get to shape the investigation. Your experience is not something to overcome on the way to real knowledge. It is a starting point. It is valid. It is, in fact, data.

After the feelings exercise, I move to the slides.

The library is one part of your information environment. Not the whole thing, not the authority, one tool in a larger ecology you’re already navigating.

What do you do first when you need to find something out? Let’s start there, with what you already do.

We look at the concept map together. They start placing their topics—homelessness, immigration enforcement, environmental racism—in relation to the keywords branching out from them. I show them how the corners of the map suggest different kinds of terms: the population, the condition, the method, the context. I show them that Boolean operators are not arcane library magic but the same logic they use when they filter anything online on the free-range Web.

Then they search. And I ask them to notice.

Notice which database you chose and why. Notice what search terms you used. Notice what the title and abstract and subject terms tell you about what this article contributes. Notice what new keywords the results are giving you that you didn’t think to use before. Notice the challenge you hit—because you will hit one, and naming it is part of learning the environment.

This is the research dive in a nutshell. Fifty minutes. One shot. And what we’re doing is not teaching them to find sources. We’re initiating them into an artisanal practice. We’re helping them develop the disposition before we hand them the tools. We’re saying: stay loose at the beginning. Notice before you commit. Let the environment tell you something before you tell it what you want.

I know my colleagues do this. I know it because I’ve seen the work, heard the consultations, read the research guides. The relational, situational, question-interrogating labor is happening everywhere in this profession.

We just don’t have good language for it yet. And because we don’t have language for it, we reach for the slogans. The pins. Google can find you millions of answers, but a librarian will find you the right one.

I say this with love: stop. That slogan sets up a competition we’ve already lost, on terrain we should never have agreed to stand on. It defends the product—the answer—rather than the process. It concedes the relational, situational, question-interrogating work entirely.

What we do cannot be described by the answer we help someone find. It can only be described by what happens to the researcher in the process of finding it. The transformation. The sharpened question. The developed feel for the environment. The metacognitive awareness that the overwhelm is a signal, not a verdict.

We are epistemic infrastructure workers. We build and maintain the conditions under which good thinking becomes possible. We don’t hand people knowledge. We help them become the kind of thinkers who can navigate a glut environment with skill, attention, and judgment that deepens over time.

That’s not what search engines do. That’s not what AI does. That’s what we do, when we do it well.

The students in that Ethnic Studies research classroom—they trickled in with their anxiety and their wonder, their not-yet-formed questions, and their deeply personal reasons for choosing their topics. They left with a feel for the terrain. A few new keywords. A named challenge. And maybe, if the session did what I hoped it would do, a slightly different relationship to their own inquiry. A sense that the curiosity they brought with them was not just incidental, but essential. That they were, in fact, already researchers.

No big deal.