Inside Higher Ed | Librarians Tackle Information Illiteracy

Inside Higher Ed | Librarians Tackle Information Illiteracy

It came as no surprise to many of those attending the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries this weekend that the typical liberal arts freshman believes Time and Newsweek to be legitimate scholarly sources. Groans and laughter accompanied this and other non-surprising factoids — 100 percent of incoming liberal arts freshmen surveyed use online sources, most think it’s easy to know when to document a source but nearly half couldn’t determine when one was required — that are familiar to anyone who works at a college library.

But while the problems of “information literacy” and the limitations of otherwise tech-savvy students’ abilities to differentiate between legitimate and unacceptable sources are well known, there is yet to be a unified, coherent approach to combating them...