"[3] The goal of a pathfinder is to gather the most useful, relevant, reliable and authoritative resources on a variety of academic, work-related or general-interest topics.
[4] Originally provided in print format in the 20th century in large academic libraries,[5][6] pathfinders have evolved with the emergence of the World Wide Web and may now act as portals to information about resources in a variety of formats, including books, encyclopedias, bibliographic databases, almanacs, documentaries, websites, search engines and journals.
However they are not generally an exhaustive collection of all of the materials on a given topic- they are designed for beginners in research to find the fundamental information they need to get started.
[8] Pathfinders also help to teach essential information and technology skills, and promote books and reading.
[12] It has been argued to expand the purpose of a research guide from being a list of resources to also incorporating instruction on information literacy, both in 1984[13] and 2014.
[8] In 1995, Jim Kapoun argued that key features of good pathfinders were "compactness and basic informational resources".
[1] Patricia Knapp, in the 1960s, integrated librarianship with academic instruction,[19] but the term pathfinder was coined in 1972 by Marie Canfield.
[28] A 2011 study found that students often do not use library guides simply by not knowing they exist, or preferring to use a search engine or a trusted bibliographic database instead.
This study found that students would use the subject guides if they didn't know where to begin, or if they were navigating a new discipline or if their lecturer told them to.
The use of Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs are considered to be helpful in enabling smaller libraries to quickly update their pathfinders.
[36] Jackson and Pellack examined similar subject guides at different institutions to find out about duplication of effort in pathfinders.