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IDIS 110 – Information Literacy
While catching up with a friend (and UB alumnus) last October, I mentioned that I was teaching a 100 level course at UB entitled Information Literacy (IDIS 110). As I explained what the course involved, my friend became quite animated and expressed the wish that his new employees had taken a class like that.
My friend, who works for a think tank in Washington DC, explained that his company hires a lot of people directly from college, but he finds their research skills to be poor. He provided a litany of examples to illustrate his point, adding that he had to run training sessions to teach his new hires the same concepts I was teaching freshman in IDIS 110. “I Google better than these 20 year olds, and they supposedly grew up with this stuff,” he complained.
Information literacy is the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively and ethically. Librarians have been among the leading champions of information literacy for several years and have adopted it as a natural extension of their role. In the past, academic libraries could focus on creating a quality print collection, confident that most students doing research would use the library’s collection of books, magazines and newspapers as sources for their research.
With so much more information accessible online, students are now able to find resources through a simple Web search. But more is not always better, and learning how to search effectively to find the nuggets of gold among the mountains of information available is a cornerstone of information literacy.
Libraries have adapted to this new information landscape by moving more and more of their resources online. Langsdale Library, for instance, has fewer than 300 journal titles in print, but its online databases provide electronic access to more than 12,000 journal titles.
Moving resources online makes research much more convenient for most, but it has some unfortunate side effects. For example, the visual distinction that can be made between an established newspaper and a tabloid or a scholarly journal and a magazine is lost if these sources’ content is transformed into text to display on the Web; therefore, the ability to evaluate information critically—to identify depth, reliability, bias, etc.—becomes crucially important.
Effective researching and critical evaluation are two large components of the Information Literacy at UB, and I hope and believe that it will lay a solid groundwork for students to build upon as they progress through college and beyond. After speaking with my friend about how many students are graduating without these skills, I am more convinced than ever that they will be highly valued in the workforce of the future and that Information Literacy fits in perfectly with UB’s tag line, Knowledge That Works.