by Susan Wolf, Reference Manager
I have a confession to make: I have fallen for a fake news story. Recently, I saw a post on my Facebook feed that falsely claimed a celebrity visited a town I used to live in. It only took me a minute to realize that the story was fake, but the experience made me realize just how easy it is to be fooled by an unreliable source.
What does it mean to achieve information literacy in today’s society? At the Library, we are always striving to provide broad and free access to information while at the same time promoting “information literacy.” Information literacy is the ability to find and use information and to judge the quality of the information found.
A recent information literacy study by Stanford University found that students had a difficult time identifying news stories from paid advertisements. It may be no surprise, then, that fake news stories, or news stories that are have been written with the intent to deceive, have gone viral on social media.
Another challenge to information literacy is understanding bias. Here in the Library, we carefully select sources based a number of factors, including reliability. However, this does not mean that all of the sources at the Library are completely without bias. Bias always exists. As consumers of information, it is up to us to be aware of an author's bias and to judge the source accordingly.
These challenges to information literacy are not new, however. Today, we have access to more information than ever before. While this may offer us a great convenience, we face an even greater challenge of navigating information and evaluating sources. While information literacy is a responsibility we all share, librarians are specially trained to evaluate sources and to instruct others in accessing information. Together, we can navigate this great expanse of information and ensure that our community achieves information literacy.
