25 Information Literacy

Learning Objectives

In the Introduction to Research chapter you learned how to form a research question and identify keywords to help you search for sources. You were also introduced to some of LaGuardia Library’s resources and OneSearch, a portal to search appropriate sources for college-level research.

Once you’ve found resources for your research you’ll need to evaluate what you’ve found. This process of engaging critically with information is called Information Literacy. In this chapter you will learn to:

• Explain why information literacy is necessary.
• Identify your information needs and when certain types of sources are necessary.
• Understand a broad overview of the different types of internet domains.
• Unravel bias.
• Appreciate the ethics of scholarship.

Introduction and Definition

What is Information Literacy?

You read above in the learning objectives that information literacy involves evaluating sources. Read from the LaGuardia Community College Library’s mission statement:

In a rapidly evolving society, information literacy is an essential part of becoming a critical thinker and a socially responsible citizen. Information literacy is the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information, informed by an understanding of the cultural, political, and economic factors that shape and create information.

The College’s approach to information literacy is guided by the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education published by the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

There are six concepts or frames that anchor the framework:

1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
2. Information Creation as a Process
3. Information Has Value
4. Research as Inquiry
5. Scholarship as Conversation
6. Searching as Strategic Exploration

What’s important to know is colleges world-wide teach information literacy following these frames. For a more in-depth explanation on the Framework please visit the Framework’s website. It is available in many languages, including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and more.

Why is Information Literacy Important?

Consider this example of information literacy gone awry. In 2010, a textbook used in Virginia fourth grade classrooms became big news for all the wrong reasons. The book, Our Virginia, by Joy Masoff, caught the attention of Carol Sheriff, a historian at the College of William and Mary. As she worked with her daughter, she noticed glaring historical errors, not the least of which described how thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War.

Further investigation into the textbook revealed that while the author had written books on a number of subjects she was not a trained historian. She had relied on questionable websites to write Our Virginia, including biased sources created by groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This organization promotes views of history that de-emphasize the role of slavery in the Civil War. Scholars were nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history.

In this example students were learning incorrect history. Using inaccurate, irrelevant, or poorly researched sources affects the quality of your work.

The Information Cycle

Information in any format is produced to convey a message and is shared via a selected delivery method. The iterative processes of researching, creating, revising, and disseminating information vary, and the resulting product plus how it is shared reflects these differences.

Take a look at this video to get an introduction to the information cycle.

Different information sources are geared towards different information needs. Newspapers are published daily, are frequently updated online, and cover current events. Magazines are published weekly to monthly and cover current events but often with a broader perspective since they are not covering events daily like a newspaper. Scholarly journals are published monthly to annually. These articles take months or years to write and do not reflect daily headlines. However, these are the best sources for you to use for in-depth analysis of topics like immigration, climate change, and education. In order to decide which type of material you require, focus on your research needs. Ask yourself these questions:

• What is required for your assignment?
• What is your specific research question or hypothesis?
• How can a news article and a scholarly article complement each other?

Figure 1. The Information Cycle

Activity: Guess the Source

The following activity will help you start thinking about types of sources and how you might use them in college-level research.

Choosing Sources and Evaluation

Different sources are appropriate for college level research. A free website like Wikipedia and a subscription database like Gale Ebooks are good examples of background sources because they provide an introduction to a topic. Scholarly sources, like articles in a journal, are what your professors may refer to as peer reviewed sources. If you are testing water samples for bacteria in biology class, your professor will want you to read scholarly articles with similar experiments. A scholarly article like this one will establish a hypothesis, describe an experiment, and discuss the results. Both sources serve a purpose!

The internet contains a wealth of information, but sifting through it all is the challenge. For any website you use, you should determine who owns the site. You can usually find this information in the About section of the site or in a copyright designation near the end of the landing webpage. Domain names can help you determine the purpose of the site, but you shouldn’t rely solely on this website marker. The chart below is a good rule of thumb as you are becoming literate with information sources, but as you become more advanced, learn to question sources beyond these guidelines.

Many other domains exist. Research the validity of domain names outside these most common ones.

Advanced Google Tips and Tricks

Knowing site domains can also improve your Google research skills by helping limit your results to specific sites on the internet.

To do so we’ll follow this format:

[what are you researching?] site:[domain]

Let’s practice this trick by searching for climate change sources on government websites for an environmental science research paper.

Our search, climate change site:.gov results with the Global Climate Dashboard (climate.gov), the Environmental Protection Agency (epa.gov), and NASA’s Vital Signs of the Planet site (climate.nasa.gov).

You may also want to provide examples of how climate change is affecting New Yorkers, which would be easily found in a newspaper. You can follow the same approach for specific sites within a domain, like The New York Times:

“New York City climate change site:nyt.com” all of the articles are from the New York Times:

1. “No Snow in NYC Feels Nice – But Also A Little Unsettling”
2. “Ida Flooding Deaths Push Council to Demand Climate Change Plan for NY”
3. “New York’s Record Warm Winter: Good for Sunbathing, Bad for Ski Slopes”

You might have even noticed the New York Times logo next to each result!

These videos will illustrate what you’ve just read.

• How to Search by Domain – Improve Your Google Search Skills
• Advanced Google Searching
  • Note: In this video the research topic, climate change, follows the site. The results are similar.

S.I.F.T: Evaluate Information in a Digital World

The library offers a wide range of research materials that are selected by librarians. However, you might search on the internet as well. In this case you will need to evaluate what you’ve found. As discussed above in the Information Cycle section, there are strategies for evaluating information on the Web. In addition to paying attention to a website’s domain type, the S.I.F.T. method will help you learn more about a particular website, which stands for Stop, Investigate, Find, Trace.

You’ve done a search, and now it is time to evaluate what you’ve found. Follow these four steps to fact check your feed:

1. Stop
   Ask yourself whether you know and trust the website or source of the information. If you don’t, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share it until you know what it is.
2. Investigate the Source
   Know the expertise and agenda of your source so you can interpret it. Look up your source in Wikipedia. Consider what other sites say about your source. A fact checking site like PolitiFact can help. Read carefully and consider while you click. Open multiple tabs.
3. Find trusted coverage
   Find trusted reporting or analysis, look for the best information on a topic, or scan multiple sources to see what consensus is. Find something more in-depth and read about more viewpoints. Look beyond the first few results, use Ctrl + F, and consider the URL. Even if you don’t agree with the consensus, it will help you investigate further.
4. Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context
   Trace claims, quotes and media back to the source. What was clipped out of a story/photo/video and what happened before or after? When you read the research paper mentioned in a news story, was it accurately reported? Find the original source to see the context, so you can decide if the version you have is accurately presented.

S.I.F.T. in Practice

The following videos by Mike Caufield, founder of the SIFT Method, provide helpful examples of how SIFT can be put into practice.

Online Verification Skills, Mike Caufield, SIFT Method

Investigate the Source, Mike Caufield, SIFT Method

Understanding Scholarly Articles

While you always need to be a critical reader, some articles and books you read for college are different from anything else you have read before. In particular, scholarly articles can be challenging and difficult to understand. These articles are written for scholars, experts, and students (like you). Since the intended audience is not the general public, these articles include ideas, data, information, and approaches you may not be familiar with. But that’s ok! We all have to start somewhere and there are methods to learn what you need from a complex scholarly article, even if there are parts you still do not understand.

Remember, you can find scholarly articles most reliably by using the Library’s website. This is covered in more detail in the Introduction to Research chapter. The Library’s subscription databases give LaGuardia students access to content that is not available for free on the Web.

Before reading scholarly articles, it’s helpful to understand their structure. The list below describes the components of Scholarly articles in the Social Sciences and Physical Sciences. The majority of research articles in these disciplines will have the sections listed below, but there will always be some outliers.

• Abstract: a brief summary of the article, including the methodology and results.
• Introduction: background information about the topic of research, with reasoning for why the study is being done.
• Methods: how the study was done. The details of the research, including set-up and how the data was collected.
• Results/Findings: Presentation of the data from the study. This section often includes charts, tables and graphs as visual representations of the data.
• Discussion: analysis of the data, and how the study relates to existing knowledge of the topic. The authors evaluate whether the results of their study actually answered their research question.
• Conclusion: The authors wrap up the article by discussing how their study adds to the existing knowledge on the topic and outline potential research for further studies.

Next, you can use the following strategy for reading scholarly articles:

• First: read the abstract as it covers the basics of the article. Ask yourself, what is this article about? What is the working hypothesis or thesis?
• Second: Read the introduction and discussion/conclusion. These sections present and describe the main argument and hypothesis of the article. The introduction gives you the background information you need for the topic. The introduction also includes info about previous studies/papers that relate to the current one, which gives you, the reader, a context. The conclusion/discussion tells you what happened in the study. By reading the conclusion you see whether the study answered the original research question and what the authors see as the next steps in the scholarship.
• Third: Take a look at the tables, charts and graphs to get a better idea of the results of the research or analytical study. Compare your conclusions and thoughts about the article to what the authors saw in their results and data.

Please keep in mind why you are reading the article. Did your professor assign it? Are you planning to cite the article in your own research paper? These factors will also contribute to how you read and think about the article. If you are confused or unsure about parts of the article, check in with your professor. Ask a librarian for help during the research process if you are having trouble choosing an article. When writing your paper, make an appointment with the Writing Center for help structuring your own paper.

Bias

Information sources reflect their creators’ expertise and credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need and the context in which the information will be used. Authority is not fixed. In fact, various communities may recognize different types of authority. There are different types of authority, such as subject expertise, societal position, or special experience.

You can often determine what type of authority is needed by considering the context within which you will need it. For example, let’s say you have to write a persuasive essay about the environmental harm of fossil fuels. Which source would you consider credible in this context?

1. A printed encyclopedia from 1985
2. A report from Exxon, a fossil fuel company
3. A NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) government report
4. Interviews with indigenous water protectors, whose rivers are polluted by fossil fuels

Some of these sources have a vested interest in encouraging you to believe a particular story, so let’s review them. The encyclopedia may not intentionally attempt to mislead you; however, the information is almost 40 years old. The fossil fuel company makes billions of dollars by downplaying the impacts of climate change. In fact, investigations have shown that the oil company understood the science since at least the 1970s (many years before it became a public issue) and spent millions to promote misinformation.

NASA, a professional, government organization doesn’t profit from misguiding you and provides its ethics policy for review. The report is likely written by researchers with subject expertise.

Like NASA researchers, indigenous water protectors have special experience of living on the land and experience the harm of fossil fuels directly. Their knowledge is worthy of consideration and research, although it is often left out.

This level of critical thinking and examination is the only way to ensure you have all the information you need to make decisions.

In the example about global warming we see authority contextualized by recognizing bias in an author’s work. Bias is when someone expresses a view that is one-sided without much consideration for information that might negate what they believe. Bias is most prevalent in sources that cover controversial issues where the author may attempt to persuade their readers to one side of the issue without giving fair consideration to the other side of things. If the research topic you are using has ever been the cause of heated debate, you will need to be especially watchful for any bias in the sources you find.

Bias can be difficult to detect, particularly when we are looking at persuasive sources that we want to agree with. If you want to believe something is true, chances are you’ll side with your own internal bias without consideration for whether a source exhibits bias.

Here are some questions to keep in mind when evaluating for bias:

1. What biases related to this research might the authors hold?
2. Whose voice or point of view is represented?
3. What points of view might be missing?
4. What might be lost by primarily relying on certain voices in the field?
5. Does the author identify an aspect of their identity as important to their research?

Sometimes a bias is based on lived experience, and the author’s identity important to their research. The video, “Positionality & Research: How our Identities Shape Inquiry”, explores how our identities shape our positions, or context, and how that influences research.

As a college student you are learning to be a researcher and creator of knowledge. Consider how your work is constructed and contextual:

1. How do you choose a topic to research?
2. How is it connected to your life experiences or aspects of your identity?

Based on your experiences related to your topic, what potential biases might you bring to your research?

Ethics of Scholarship

Honesty and transparency are essential for scholarship. Citation is perhaps the most important concept as it relates to college-level work. Citation is the process of identifying and giving credit to the sources you have used. When do you need to cite information? What kind of information requires a citation? Basically, if it is not your idea or creation, you need to cite it and give credit to the source where you found the information. This can include books, articles, websites, movies, and social media posts. Complete the following activity that asks you to arrange sources into two categories: “yes, cite this” or “no need to cite this.”

Activity: Do I need to cite this source? 

Citation directs the reader to the work you used; it spans time and geography to represent all of the information you used in order to come up with your ideas. It is also a tool that makes it easier for a reader to scan through the research you did. It is a standard, uniform way of presenting information that creates predictability. Putting the two ideas together, formal citation allows your readers to build upon your hard work researching a topic; it also gives you a way into the work that others have done.

LaGuardia students are most likely to use two forms of citation: in-text and works cited. The first, in-text citation, is included in the body of your writing. It is shorter than a full citation because you are acknowledging a source when it is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized in your writing (more on that soon). Then, at the end of your essay you should include a list of complete citations for all of your sources. The particulars of in-text and works cited lists will vary depending on what citation style you need to use. MLA and APA are the most common. How you incorporate your sources into your writing is also very important. Below are examples of how to effectively quote, paraphrase, and summarize sources.

Paraphrase

Paraphrasing is restating someone else’s original ideas or findings in your own words, at the same level of detail. The successful paraphrase below shows how to take a longer paragraph and put it in your own words, while providing a citation for the original source. The example of plagiarism below does not change the original enough to count as a paraphrase, nor does it include a citation.

Take, for example, this quote from a book about writing academic papers:

“Students frequently overuse direct quotation in taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes.”​ (Lester, 1976, pp.46-7)

Summarizing is a bit different than paraphrasing in that you are simplifying the original source to get the main point across. In the below example, the successful summary is short and cites the original source. The example of plagiarism does little to change the original language, nor does it include a citation.

How would you summarize the same quote used above?

While direct quoting may seem simple and straightforward, it is challenging in practice. As the example you were shown above states, it is best to limit the amount of direct quotes in your writing. Your professor wants to read your writing, not your sources’ writing! Be strategic and pick the shortest quote that best supports your words and ideas.

Copyright, Licensing, and Open Educational Resources

The book you are currently reading is an open educational resource (OER). This is in contrast to traditionally copyrighted material, which are all rights are reserved, and where often you must pay to access the content. Many OER authors see education as a human right, and therefore do not want to restrict not only access to their content, but also retention, reuse, revision, remixing, and redistribution of their materials. Creative commons is the license that OER authors use for their content. Take a look at the contrasts below between copyrighted material and creative commons material:

This letter ‘C’ in a circle is the symbol you have probably seen before that denotes copyrighted material. Copyright means that the author reserves all rights. It is applied automatically and means that the author is the only person with the rights to reproduce, distribute copies of, publicly display, perform, or make derivatives of their work.

In contrast, these two Cs in a circle denote creative commons material. Material licensed through creative commons is material that the author reserves some, but not all rights to. This license is opted into and allows authors to decide to what extent others can reproduce, distribute copies of, publicly display, perform, or make derivatives of their work.

When referencing copyrighted material, you would use citation to indicate that you have drawn on ideas from a copyrighted source. However, because Creative Commons materials are explicitly allowed to be reused, if you reuse open content you would not cite, but instead attribute the portions that you reused. One popular tool for building attributions is the Open Washington Attribution Builder.

The production and dissemination of Open Educational Resources draws on a philosophy of education which holds that educational materials should be freely available to all. This is particularly true for scholarship or resources that are produced as a result of public funds, such as at a public university like CUNY. Watch this video to learn more about these ideas: Talk by Open Education Activist Professor Robin DeRosa.

References, Licenses and Attributions

Association of College & Research Libraries (2015, February 2). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Baldwin, A. (2020). 7.7 Information Literacy. In College Success. OpenStax. License: CC BY 4.0

Bernnard, D., Bobish, G., Hecker, J., Holden, I., Hosier, A.,  Jacobson, T.,  Loney, T.,  & Bullis, D. (2014). The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Connected Learning Alliance (2016, October 11). Robin DeRosa – Ignite Talk DML2016. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/IpOP6RZXzXQ. License: CC BY 4.0

CTRL-F (2018, March 25). Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/yBU2sDlUbp8. License: All Rights Reserved.

CTRL-F (2018, June 29). Online Verification Skills — Video 2: Investigate the Source. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/hB6qjIxKltA. License: All Rights Reserved.

educationaltutorials7591 (2014, February 4). How to Search by Domain – Improve Your Google Search Skills. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/S4VErBgbsJs. License: CC BY-NC 2.0

Lester, J. D. (1976). Writing Research Papers (2nd ed.). Scott, Foresman and Company.​

Pace University Library (2020, August 27). Advanced Google Searching. [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/PI_TSdVHN3c. License: All Rights Reserved.

Paraphrase: Write it in your own words. Paraphrasing – Purdue OWL® – Purdue University. (n.d.). https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/using_research/quoting_paraphrasing_and_summarizing/paraphrasing.html

UCLA Library (2021, March 16). Positionality & Research: How our Identities Shape Inquiry. https://youtu.be/fTHFud7fr8c. License: CC BY 4.0

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (n.d.). The Information Cycle Chart. License: All Rights Reserved.

University of Las Vegas Libraries (2016, July 19). The Information Lifecycle. License: CC BY-NC 3.0