Professor/Librarian, Southwestern Illinois College
By Jan Zuke
As recently as twenty years ago, the greatest problem facing the researcher was that of finding enough information. Today, the problem is reversed. We go on the Internet, type a word, and are deluged with information of every kind related to that term. Our problem now is not to find enough information, but to find the right information, the information we need and want, and to exclude that which we do not need or want. We need to focus. Unfortunately, focusing is becoming increasingly difficult in the current world of noise and brief attention spans.
The traditional library contained a great deal of information, initially in books and periodicals, later on phonograph records, film, tape, CDs, and DVDs, all selected and placed in the library by someone in some way qualified to do this selecting. The college library, with a narrower focus than the public library, has always contained information selected for its students: to supplement the curriculum; to aid in resource-based learning; to help students learn more as well as to research speeches, papers, and other assignments. The sources were selected for suitability as well as for reliability, and arranged, in an effort to make them accessible, in ways that became increasingly esoteric and required instruction to master.
Today’s library still contains these items, but it serves more and more as a gateway to the world of electronic media, unselected, unfiltered, reliable or unreliable, not arranged, but very, very accessible. Students often do not understand the difference between the information sources carefully screened and selected for their use, those carefully aimed at them as consumers of information or customers, and those thrown at them by purveyors of unsupported opinion, hoaxes, attempts to defraud or deceive, or simple ignorance. The first response to this on the part of teachers, often as confused as their students, but concerned about unreliable information, is to forbid or limit the use of “internet sources” for research. While understandable, this reaction does little more than delay the inevitable. What we need is a plan that employs a method to tap into the vast potential of information media, while preventing our students (and ourselves) from being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what is available. The need for information literacy is upon us.
Information literacy is defined by the American Library Association as the set of skills needed to recognize when information is needed, to locate, evaluate and use the information effectively. The first two are now easy for our students. The last one, they are to be taught in school. It is the evaluation of information that is, today, the most difficult task. Once we have found information, how do we know if it is reliable, accurate, trustworthy, current, suitable to our quest, any one of a number of things we need? This is the critical skill both of information literacy and of media literacy. Media literacy deals with the critical examination of messages received passively, sometimes without the receiver’s consent or will; information literacy deals with the critical examination of packets of information actively sought by the receiver. Both involve critical examination, critical thinking, and decision making about the quality of the message.
We cannot tell our students simply to avoid the internet or any other unfiltered medium, be it mass media or social media. We must do something far more difficult: we must teach them how to evaluate information. This is not, alas, as easy as separating the bad information from the good. Almost all information (except that in the form of indisputable facts; and what facts are indisputable, really?) has a viewpoint. It can be as obviously skewed as the rants of political pundits, as insidious as the smooth persuasion of wide-eyed advertising models, as apparently detached as the mainstream news media. All of this information is at least selected and edited, at most created and shaped— in the one case in the interests of brevity and manageability, in the other in the interests of persuasion and the separation of the consumer from his money. Our students must learn to find, and to understand, who is delivering the message, what this person or entity’s purpose is (like making money) and how to find the information necessary to distinguish fact from fiction, opinion, or misrepresentation.
Many people, young and not-so-young, do not understand that businesses exist to make money, that a politician’s purpose is to win elections, that most media are not there with the altruistic motive of offering valuable information for free for the good of all. At the possible cost of stealing our children’s innocence, we must prevent them from having more important things stolen from them; their names, their rights, their money, their intellectual freedom.
Information literacy, with media literacy and critical thinking— all inextricably linked and overlapping— is a new life skill for the twenty-first century. Anyone not equipped with this skill or set of skills is open to becoming a victim of misinformation, disinformation, fraud, and intellectual slavery. The President has declared October to be National Information Literacy Awareness Month, acknowledging the critical importance of information literacy in improving productivity, reducing the achievement gap in schools, and making wiser decisions in public and private life.
As President Obama noted, our students will soon be making difficult decisions on health care, citizenship, social issues and economic challenges. Part of our mission must be to equip them with the tools to make such decisions in an informed fashion. In the 21st century, the most critical of such tools is information literacy.
Bio – Jan has worked in university, public, and community college libraries since the Sixties and has been the librarian at the Sam Wolf Granite City Campus library of Southwestern Illinois College for over twenty years. She danced around the bonfire when the paper card catalogs were burned; she both celebrates and is concerned about the rapid transition from all-paper to increasingly electronic media. She is a rabid proponent of critical thinking and believes that education is our nation’s only hope of salvation. Her email address is : jan.zuke@swic.edu
