6 posts tagged “information literacy”

The whole fiasco with Elsevier and their fake journals (and unlike the more polite people, I have no problem calling a spade a spade, and these were basically fake journals sponsored by a big pharmaceutical passing themselves off as serious journals) has been discussed in various librarian blogs. This is why I am just scraping some of my thoughts here and leaving it out of the main blog.

Here are some links for those who may be interested:

• Barbara Fister, writing for ACRLog, on "This Journal Brought to You By. . ." 
• Jessamyn West notes "in case you needed another reason to raise an eyebrow at Elsevier" at librarian.net. 
• And by the way, the Annoyed Librarian had a very nice reply to this whole mess as well. You do have to grant some of AL's points: in this case, Elsevier basically pulled a fast one.
  

The one thing I thought about when I read about the issue is that this just makes our work teaching information literacy that much more harder. As information literacy or instruction librarians, we spent a lot of time teaching our students how to evaluate resources. We spend even more time telling them to rely on "peer reviewed" publications. And now we get that we can't even trust the "peer reviewing" since it is not so much scholars doing it as some big pharma corporation. Let's consider the ethics of the matter, which is about the only thing we can really consider. I mean, we can be angry at Elsevier, but in the end, Elsevier is like any other big corporation, and they did the move that would make them money, ethics be damned. But the larger problem does go back to corporations like Elsevier who take research (often done with federal money, i.e. paid by your taxes) and repackages it and sells it to the libraries. Until those doing the research actually take some control and come up with some better ways to disseminate their information in an ethical way, the corporations will keep doing this, and we as librarians will just have to be that much more wary of information sources. And to be honest, why the heck the federal government (in the U.S. at least) not make it a requirement to make any federally funded research be published for free (put it in PubMed or something like that), since we paid the tab, is simply beyond me.It can be done; there is just a serious lack of spine to do it, but then again, that is politics for you. And let's not even start on why the U.S. government often outsources their information to vendors (can you say Lexis, for example?).

But it is also going to take the scholars to finally get a clue as well. Until academia decides to have the intestinal fortitude to come up with other ways to evaluate for tenure besides how many articles you get in an Elsevier journal (or other big corporate-owned journal), and until scholars basically stop serving on those editorial boards, and instead help create better models of distribution where the information is not held by some conglomerate more interested in the bottom line than some ethics, things will not change. Now, I am not an expert by any stretch; others from advocates for open access to repository librarians to those librarian bloggers with bigger reputations have been saying it. I am just a librarian with a thought or two and a dislike for the way things are currently done. And at the end of the day, I am the librarian in the front lines who has to teach the students how to evaluate sources, and now I have to start making another distinction: that is a real scholarly journal, and that other one is paid for by Merck (or insert your big pharma company here). This publisher seems to have some integrity, and this other one is pretty much open to the highest bidder. Because we often make a big fuss when a student plagiarizes or tries to pass other's work as their own. But when a company like Elsevier basically commits an act of academic dishonesty (or just plain dishonesty), they don't exactly get raked over the coals as they deserve. Then again, we should know better as information professionals to question the sources of information. And we should be noting and be aware that a lot of that information we depend on in academia is coming from a corporate source, the type of source not necessarily interested in things like ethics or integrity. We have to remember that their interest is the bottom line and the investors. If it so happens they provide information products academia can use so much the better. But make no mistake, they are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. This means we should be on our guard and constantly asking questions and demanding accountability. 

And those are my two cents, for what they may be worth.
  

I have been seeing a good number of items online on FB, social networks, and social networking literacy. A lot has to do with how to handle the public and private aspects of these online tools and knowing where to draw the line. Personally, the issue of how much to present of myself online is something I always think about. These is a sampling of some things I have seen recently:

• Alex Golub writes on "The Flaws of Facebook" for Inside Higher Ed. While mostly geared to campus faculty, the article has a thing or two to say to academic librarians as well.
  
• The Irascible Professor has a guest post by Felice Prager on "Social Networking for Dummies." This one is more tongue-in-cheek, but it is worth a read.
  
• From the AllFacebook blog, "10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know." FB is notorious for making it difficult for users to set privacy parameters, often making it hard to find just where exactly one goes to set particular privacy limits. This list should help. 
• danah boyd announced that she finally finished her dissertation. The topic: "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Network Publics" (warning, big PDF file). This is certainly worth a look for librarians. Do read her post, which gives some highlights and provides the abstract, then feel free to look over the document itself. 
• Fred Stutzman points to an article out of portal:Libraries and the Academy on "Academic Libraries, Facebook, MySpace and Student Outreach." I am not linking to the article itself, since it is on Project Muse and likely requires subscription, but for academic librarians, they need to be reading it. It is on my pile of articles to read soon. In the same post, he also points to another article on virtual reference.
  
• David Spark, writing for Mashable, has an article on "12 Great Tales of Defriending." I include it on this list because sometimes, when it comes to social networks, you have the face the possibility of having to purge your friends' list for a variety of reasons. The article has a humourous tone, but it does consider serious issues. 
• Kate Sheehan, writing for ALA TechSource blog, has a piece on "Making Friends" that deals with friending on social networks. 
• Scientific American magazine has an article asking "Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?"  The article was published in August 2008, and the author is Daniel J. Solove. 

To some who say that librarians may be obsolete some day, as long as there is a need to teach a little social networking literacy and common sense to the younger generations, we'll still have some work.

While I do have a healthy respect for some of the elders in the library profession, once in a while I have to wonder if they have been out of the trenches a bit too long. Steven Bell, who is an acknowledged advocate of minimal library instruction for information literacy, has a new piece out on faculty involvement. It all seems pretty good until he gets to this part:

But I can imagine some information literacy and instruction librarians asking themselves “if faculty do ever fully integrate this into their courses and teach it without me - what will I do for a living?” The possibility of librarians being made obsolete by faculty following the examples described above, I think, is highly unlikely. But even if the majority of faculty did, I think that academic librarians would still be needed to support the development and design of instructional activity and digital-learning materials. Our new opportunity would be back-end support - making sure faculty were up-to-date on the e-resources and well equipped with the tools to integrate them into their courses. This could be a whole new growth area for librarian educators. That’s where I’ve advocated the growing importance of instructional design and technology in the work of librarians. I don’t know exactly where academic librarians will be in the future, but if it wasn’t at the front of the classroom that would be fine with me - as long as we play a role in what happens there.

Just some librarians may ask themselves? You just pretty much said that our new role will be in the back-end support. You know, with the IT people and the others in the backrooms who never see real people? Is that really an area of growth, or are we looking at yet another way to de-professionalize and get rid of a few more librarians in the process? I do ask because, for example, here we have what is called an instructional designer who does, well, instructional technology and design. The person is not a librarian by degree or trade, but she would certainly be the sort of person that Professor Bell seems to have in mind. And why is it that being in the front of a classroom seems to be such a bad thing? Some of the best work we do is working with students and in front of their classes. And while educating faculty on things like e-resources is important, we do have a role as well in helping educate students and in the larger educational mission of the university. And statements like the one above can certainly be used to eliminate, or at the very least, keep librarians from the educational roles we should be engaging. Maybe the back-end is good enough for some people. It is not good enough for me, and I am sure it is not good enough for a few of my colleagues. Our instruction librarian would be a good example. Spent the last two years or so building an information literacy program from the ground up with extensive involvement with faculty in what was then known as the Freshman Seminar program. University decides to scrap the program, for some fairly dubious reasons, and we are back to zero pretty much. And while we could document our successes in reaching students, the university pretty much saw us as "the back-end" support anyhow. I am sure she would have a thing or two to say about taking librarians out of the front of the classroom to let the faculty do it, so to speak. I have seen the faculty do it, and it is not always as ideal as the selected examples Professor Bell cites in his post. At the end of the day, that is much of the problem with the library literature: you only see the positives, which at times are exceptions rather than representations of the rule. But hey, we can all just go work in the back-end.

Let me start with a hat tip to Blogging Pedagogy for pointing to the this Ars Tecnica post on a report about researchers and information behavior. The report, sponsored by British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, dispels many of the common myths and assumptions about the Google Generation, defined in the report as "a popular phrase that refers to a generation of young people, born after 1993, that is growing up in a world dominated by the internet." The L2 gurus are always telling us how the Google Gens are hip, impatient, and always willing to embrace Google for their research assignments. They also like to remind us how the Google Gens will forsake libraries since they are so comfortable in and adept at using online tools. For the L2 folks, it's often another reason to sound the death knell of libraries yet again. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and the report gives some evidence to tell us it is not as simple as the gurus make it sound.

For me, the report provided a lot of questions. Was it hopeless? Not quite, but it can be a wake up call. I did actually read the whole thing, and I made a lot of notes as I was reading it of things that struck me, or made me think. I think I had enough for two pretty substantial posts, but to be honest, I don't quite feel like posting the notes. If I recall, maybe one or two of the librarian bloggers picked up on it (as in said something along the lines of "go take a look."). It did get picked up in the Wired Campus blog as well here. The comments there mostly reflect the usual audience of the Chronicle of Higher Education, for what it's worth. Yet I think the report should be looked at by librarians, especially those in instructional roles. It should be discussed. One idea I had was passing it on to our instruction librarian. There are some items in the document that could be used as talking points for promoting the library's instruction program. Anyhow, just thinking aloud a bit. In the meantime, I will file the rest of the draft for now.

Update/Supplement Note (same day): Nancy Deegan, writing for The Information Literacy Land of Confusion, points to a small exploratory study reported on First Monday, on the topic of Google and students. The sample used is extremely limited, which reminds me why I always take the time to read the methodology of articles. Anyways, another addition.

Michael Lorenzen, of the Information Literacy Land of Confusion, pointed to a CNN article entitled "Study: Food in McDonald's Wrapper Tastes Better to Kids." The article itself is worth reading. I was intrigued by the connection that Lorenzen makes to information literacy:

"I wonder how this impacts information literacy and Web evaluation skills? Do students automatically trust information on some sites based on previous marketing exposure? Can corporations over time build trust in their brands to such a degree that information on their Web sites seems better to some surfers? Might make for an interesting study."

I think it would make an interesting study indeed. I am not quite sure how I would go about it, but I think it would be interesting to try. Anyhow, I wanted to make a note of it now to ponder later.

I read a few political blogs. In the interest of disclosure, I will say that most of the blogs in the political category in my aggregator fall in the liberal side, though I also have at least one libertarian blog and a couple of conservatives. Having said that, the reason I am thinking about this is that I came across this post by Marc Meola, writing for the ACRLog, asking "Can (Political) Blogs Be Trusted?" Mr. Meola is describing an ALA program on the topic. In the process, there are some interesting questions to consider in terms of our students. I am always thinking of ways to teach how to better evaluate sources of information and overall how to think more critically. When it comes to political blogs, one has to be especially careful. Here are some questions Mr. Meola rises for us librarians, which I think are things we should be teaching our students to ask too:

• "As librarians and educators, we often recommend that students distinguish fact from opinion, usually without much more guidance than just stating it. This guidance is usually given in the context of the student needing information to write an argumentative paper, perhaps for a first year writing course. When we advise students this way, are we saying that all opinion writing should be distrusted? Or treated with less trust and more skepticism than so-called factual writing? Does this advice help for teaching students how to cultivate a useful attitude for dealing with opinion writing for the rest of their adult lives?"
  
• "There’s also the problem that readers of political blogs an opinion may be reading them for other reasons, to have their own opinions confirmed for example, and are therefore less likely to be open to information at odds with their own point of view. Or they may also just be nakedly politically motivated and perhaps they agree with attacking someone who disagrees with the group, regardless of the facts."
  

Mr. Meola then urges libraries to follow the Library Bill of Rights, especially the idea of offering materials and information representing all views.In the end, Mr. Meola says it well:

"As educated members of an information abundant society, we need to learn not only how to disentangle fact from opinion, but also how to put a check on our own ability to customize the information we receive by actively seeking out opinions that differ from our own, so that we aren’t increasingly caught in our own echo chambers."

Maybe that is why I try to read items that I may not agree with or differ from my political views. I strive to avoid the echo chambers. It's not an easy thing to do. It is so much easier to simply have one's views confirmed. But one cannot be truly informed or educated if one does not look at diverse views, weigh and evaluate them, and then make an informed decision.