How often have you felt overwhelmed by all the information that is available on a topic? When you do a Google search, the number of results is often mind boggling, isn’t it? Who gets to the 5th page of the results, let alone the 15th? It is the rare topic that doesn’t yield a surfeit of information. The subject of interest might be almost anything: a sport or medical issue, a hobby, a political situation or a public celebrity. Or it could be an aspect of your field of study. There is just SO much information.

How do you deal with all of it? Once you have found the best sources, how do you organize them? And if you do undertake the work of selecting and organizing the best sources, would sharing the result with others who have a similar interest be helpful to them? Take a few minutes to reflect on the following:

• Is there a topic that you collect information about?

• How do you keep track of the best information that you find? Consider online information: do you bookmark the sites you might want to return to? Or keep track in some other way?

• Are you happy with your ability to keep track of the information you’ve found and selected? Or do you feel like the sources you’ve chosen so carefully are getting lost?

Have you heard of the idea of content curation? Trend curator Rohit Bhargava describes content curation as "the act of finding grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue." Librarians, museum curators and marketers are all examples of professional curators who organize content to make it easier for others to find and access. There are several different methods and reasons for curating information, as illustrated by the following infographic.

Read the Content Curation Primer by Beth Kanter, and then complete the following activity. Keep in mind that although this quest was written for organizations, almost all of it applies in non-organization settings!

Now that you know more about content curation, answer the following questions using one of these scenarios to give shape to your response. Write your response to questions #1-6 below in the form of an email message to your mentor, who doesn’t know much about this topic, but who is very interested in you and your success.

1. What is content curation?

2. How does content curation differ from content aggregation?

3. How you would choose the topic that would be ideal for you to curate?

4. What expertise or added value might you bring to the topic you’ve selected?

5. Who would be interested in the resource you produce?

6. Would you be able to provide introductions to each of the information sources you select?