Perhaps this isn't the appropriate stance for a prospective librarian to be, but I feel like we're more embedded in the "information as a thing" school, rather than the "information as a evolutionary process" school. Obviously a person coming to us trying to use information to grow, reassess old information and provide pathways to new information would come to a librarian. Regardless of what we do, we direct that evolution in the method we use to help them get their information, which information they get, and which information they don't get.
It's a problem I met when I was working on my circulation building exercise. I found information I considered to be not merely irrelevant but dangerously erroneous, and could I really be considered to be informing them on Islam if I gave them a book titled "How Islam is Destroying America" full of fearmongering and deliberate misinformation?
Working in a library, the question asked most often of me (as a glorified receptionist) is "I don't know what I need to know". This is also the question I remember asking a lot as a kid, and even trying to do research projects. A patron trying to build a bridge may not know what a bridge is, so to speak.
Of the three methods laid out in the "User Centered Information Service" article, I think Cthulhu's method is the best. Kulthau, I was close. Morris describes it as the most specific, and it is, but as an overarching methodology (learning how to draw a cat by watching Kulthau draw a pony, metaphorically) learning to recognize different stages in your patron's research and help them accordingly strikes me as the most valuable, and not merely because it was the only one I could easily understand.
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