Brian Coutts and Rosemary Meszaros of Western Kentucky University recently joined us to explore the role of the librarian as scholar. Brian is this year's winner of the Reference and User Services Association's (RUSA) Isador Mudge Award. View the recording here (plus slides). 

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.

Librarians Ray Pun and Meggan Houlihan recently presented on best practices and new directions academic libraries can explore when providing orientation and instruction to first year students.

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.  

We understand your library wants to post fun content to social media but that you might not have the time to dedicate to writing it, so we’d like to help!

Over the weekend, one of Donald Trump’s senior advisors rejected the premise that the president and his press secretary were spreading falsehoods about attendance at Friday’s inauguration. Kellyann Conway said that they were sharing “alternative facts,” a term that drew befuddled laughter from her interviewer.

Students might not be as fluent in social media as we once thought, and the implications are staggering in terms of how they navigate information online. Well before the Fake News stories broke following the 2016 election, Stanford University conducted a study of middle school through college-aged students, and found that not only were they consistently unable to discern real articles from native advertising (ads made to look like articles, usually marked, “sponsored content”), they struggled to understand even some basic conventions of social media.

We understand your library wants to post fun content to social media but that you might not have the time to dedicate to writing it, so we’d like to help!