Library and Information Science Commons^™

Information Literacy In The Covid 19 Pandemic/Post Pandemic Era: Student And Faculty Perspectives, Laura Zucca-Scott, Julia Suchan

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

This phenomenological study focused on the perspectives and experiences of students and faculty as they engaged in a dialogue on the importance of information literacy and its relevance in today’s world. As a team of a graduate faculty member and a graduate student assistant, we interviewed students about their views on information literacy and its application to scholarly and everyday activities.

The purpose of our project was to investigate the needs and wants of students. With the COVID 19 Pandemic, we witnessed a profound transformation in education and a sharp increase in remote learning. Students expressed mixed feelings about the …

Navigating Monsters: Credibility In The Twittersphere, Carrie A. Boettcher

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The increasing use of OSM during emergency, or potentially threatening, situations creates conditions in which emergency planners and responders need a high level of investigative skill to weed through a dynamic information landscape to determine the quality of information to contribute to improved situation awareness. This weeding process transforms the big data environment of OSM to focused information retrieval. Inquiry into indicators of quality in OSM (authority, objectivity, currency, coverage, and glyphicality) during severe weather situations informs how OSM impacts the information behavior of the severe weather enterprise of the U. S. Specifically, this paper focuses on investigation into how …

What We Talk About When We Talk About Quality: A Librarian And Instructor Compare How They Assess Students' Sources, Elizabeth Pickard, Sarah Sterling

Collaborative Librarianship

This case study explores and compares how a librarian and an instructor evaluated the quality of bibliographies students produced for the instructor’s class. The ethnographic study attempted to unearth nuances in the respective practical approaches librarian and instructor took to assess a source’s quality as well as differences in what librarian and instructor might mean by “quality.” Themes emerged as indicators of quality that librarian and instructor applied differently in terms of frequency and weight. Findings also included that librarian and instructor looked to different aspects of citations to demonstrate common values, such as thoroughness, and to reflect the quality …

Who’S Evaluating The Evaluators? Cognitive Biases, Fake News, And Information Literacy, Jon C. Pope, Kim Becnel

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

In response to the increased attention to “fake news” and “alternative facts” as information challenges in the wake of the recent election cycle, librarians and educators have dramatically stepped up efforts to cultivate basic information literacy skills, especially prioritizing the careful evaluation of online sources of information. While these critical source evaluation skills are an essential component of functional information literacy, the recent emphasis on them is predicated on a model of communication that assumes that the readers of these online sources are capable—and desirous—of making informed, objective judgments about the credibility of an external information source. Rhetorical theories, however, …

U.S. Newspaper Editors’ Ratings Of Social Media As Influential News Sources, Masahiro Yamamoto, Seungahn Nah, Deborah S. Chung

Information Science Faculty Publications

Social media, as one key platform for citizen journalism, are becoming a useful news-gathering tool for journalists. Based on data from a nationwide probability sample of newspaper editors in the United States, this study investigates the extent to which newspaper editors consider social media an influential news source. Results show that variations in editors’ ratings of social media as a news source were related to multiple levels of influence, including professional journalistic experience, organization size, community structural pluralism, and citizen journalism credibility. Implications are discussed for the roles of social media in news production.

Library Instruction Credibility: How Do We Establish It? How Do We Publicize It?, Frances A. May, Yunfei Du

LOEX Conference Proceedings 2011

What I would like to propose is not a presentation but a strategy session. Over the ten years I have spent as an instruction librarian, I have come to realize that what we need is quantitative data showing the benefits that students derive from library instruction. It needs to be gathered and published in non-library forums, such as educational or subject specific journals. Once the benefits are publicized and understood by educators and faculty, we may be able to move beyond the fifty minute, one shot instruction session, and make an information literate society a reality.

To do this, we …

Veracity Roadmap: Is Big Data Objective, Truthful And Credible?, Victoria Rubin, Tatiana Lukoianova

FIMS Publications

This paper argues that big data can possess different characteristics, which affect its quality. Depending on its origin, data processing technologies, and methodologies used for data collection and scientific discoveries, big data can have biases, ambiguities, and inaccuracies which need to be identified and accounted for to reduce inference errors and improve the accuracy of generated insights. Big data veracity is now being recognized as a necessary property for its utilization, complementing the three previously established quality dimensions (volume, variety, and velocity), But there has been little discussion of the concept of veracity thus far. This paper provides a roadmap …

What's More Persuasive? How The Internet And Newspaper Change Opinions, Sloane E. Sheldon

Honors Theses

The Internet has become an integral part of society. While people have been turning to the Internet for their news, newspapers are still a powerful source of information. This study investigates whether the newspaper or Internet is more effective at altering people’s opinions. Participants included people ranging from 18-78 years old. After reading a political endorsement that appeared to come from either a printed newspaper or a news website, participants rated their opinions on this candidate. When the message included strong arguments, the source of the article did not have an effect on how well the articles were able to …

Blogging Your Research: Teaching Students To Critically Assess And Participate In The Culture Of Electronic Research And Writing, Amy Ratto Parks

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Whether we like it or not, most student writing these days happens through facebook, myspace, twitter, and texting. Though we assume that academic reading and writing ought to be distinct from social writing, it often isn’t. Students will go to Google for celebrity gossip or information on the Civil War and accept the information about both on equal terms. The seemingly simple nature of online access to information requires that we give students concrete tools to critically assess the information they find there. The fact that many students consider Wikipedia as a credible resource is evidence of this. It looks …

Credibility On The Internet: Shifting From Authority To Reliability, R. David Lankes

Faculty Publications

Purpose – This paper seeks to understand how users determine credibility in the internet environment from a conceptual level and the implications of these new methods of credibility determination on internet tools (primarily software) and services.

Design/methodology/approach – The author first examines the underlying reasons for increased dependence on the internet for information, using electronic commerce as a starting point. The central concept of “information self-sufficiency” is introduced and then examined through the lens of the internet and conversation theory.

Findings – The author finds that users are shifting from more traditional “authority” methods of credibility determination, where users cede …