Niketha McKenzie was tasked with creating an instructional platform to ensure Howard University’s incoming freshmen were aware of the library’s resources and services. She and her colleagues Adia Coleman and Kimberly Prosper reached out to faculty and students to assess the main obstacles first year students faced when conducting research, and where faculty wanted to improvement. As part of our Credo In Action webinar series, these librarians agreed to share what they learned, what they’ve created to address these needs, and how students and faculty have responded. Access the full webinar recording here!

The second installment of our Credo In Action webinar series featured librarians Darcy Gervasio and Emily Carlin of SUNY Purchase College discussing how they combat fake news. Watch the webinar recording here, and view the slides here.

In the era of fake news, biased media, and dubious websites, information literacy (IL) has come to the forefront of essential 21st century skills. Whether strating a paper, or attempting to discern the validity of the Facebook meme a friend posted, the ability to find, evaluate, and use information effectively and responsibly has never been more important. We asked academic librarians how they use Credo Online Reference Service and InfoLit Modules in their IL instruction, and this is what they told us:

One of the most common concerns we hear from librarians regards how difficult it can be to engage with faculty. This was a distinct takeaway from our booth survey at ACRL, and is something we explored in one of our most popular webinars of last year. 

A version of this post appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 14 May, 2017.

At this year’s ACRL conference we hosted a small booth survey (and raffled off a free year of InfoLit Modules to Carl Andrews, Assistant Professor/Librarian at Bronx Community College!) to get a sense of how librarians felt about FYE, faculty collaboration, and information literacy.

Sean Spicer's recent gaffe-riddled press briefing provides a real-time lesson in how the fake news sausage gets made. On Tuesday the White House Press Secretary made a series of what could optimistically be called “misstatements” about Adolf Hitler, concentration camps, and the use of chemical weapons in WWII. What followed is the new normal for 2017: a flood of fake news reports were generated, then shared on social media until it became difficult to discern which Spicer quotes were real and which had been fabricated.

We’ve been hearing a lot about requests for embedded librarians surging in the past year, especially since the term “fake news” entered the popular lexicon last fall. Because collaboration between librarians and faculty is a desired outcome in so many conversations about information literacy (IL) today, we wanted to explore best practices for this strategy.

By Raymond Pun and Katelyn Angell

One of the more heartening things to come of the past few months is that information literacy (along with media and digital literacy) has really come into its own as a mainstream topic. While talk of it used to reside mostly in niche library listservs, websites, and conferences, now it’s everywhere. Fake news may be responsible for many things, but its proliferation also seems to have spiked an interest in information literacy.