Out of curiosity, I went to Bill Gates’ Wikipedia page, clicked on the ‘history‘ option to see all the revisions and then did a control-F (aka find) for “vandalism.” In the first 500 revisions, I found 22 cases of vandalism — some funny, some probably honest mistakes and some just downright mean. This is a reminder of the speed at which these pages may change and at any moment, you could be reading erroneous information… or see a mustache painted on someone’s picture.

Always double-check your sources for confirmation of information!

Mark Moran writes:

In the libraries of old, the Dewey Decimal System got you started on research. But there is no card catalog 2.0. To use the Internet as a library you need new research skills: the ability to pick out reliable sources from an overwhelming heap of misinformation, to find relevant material amid an infinite array of options, to navigate the shifting ethics of creative commons and intellectual property rights and to present conclusions in a manner that engages modern audiences.

This is another wonderfully well written piece about the challenges we face in teaching our students 21st century research skills. The bright side is that we have the ability to teach our students how to effectively evaluate resources and determine their authority (a.k.a. “crap detection“). While this seems like an uphill (and at times futile?) battle, school librarians are doing it every day, trying to reach kids when they’re young and before they can develop a dependency on Google. One school librarian in particular, Buffy Hamilton, is – in my humble opinion – a leader in this area. (To see what she is doing with her students, check out her blog, The Unquiet Library. She also writes at the blog, Libraries and Transliteracy).

I participated in the Online Northwest conference this year. It was a nice opportunity for professional development and it took place right on the OSU campus. I attended several sessions, but the one I enjoyed most was Jen Klaudinyi’s presentation on the Cooperative Library Instruction Project (CLIP): Collaboration and Curriculum Integration: Presenting shared information literacy tutorials at the point of need.

From the CLIP wiki:

CLIP is a partnership between Western Oregon University, Oregon State University, Willamette University, and Chemeketa Community College whose mission is to design and develop sharable, web-based tutorials to assist in library instruction and information literacy… CLIP is creating tutorials that specifically address the larger ideas of information literacy. The collection might look something like an interactive, online information literacy “text book” from which librarians or instructors anywhere can select and use pieces as they choose.

CLIP is striving to serve librarians and instructors with different needs and resources. Our tutorials are free, already hosted on the web and ready to be used as they are. Simply copy the URL provided with each tutorial and distribute via websites, email, etc. We also provide source files for those who wish to download, customize and/or locally host the tutorials.

CLIP has several information literacy tutorials available at the moment:

• Developing a topic
• Incorporating Sources into your research paper
• What is a library database?
• Generating search terms
• Why you need to cite sources
• Internet searching tips
• Popular and scholarly sources
• Primary and secondary sources
• APA style aid
• MLA style aid

CLIP plans to continue adding tutorials to the site. Anyone can download these and customize them to their department, library, or school (as long as the source is attributed). Text files are available of each presentation. Why continue to remake the wheel, if great tutorials already exist? CLIP provides that opportunity.

What about the rest of the conference?

All presentations can be accessed at the Online NW website. Previous conference posts can be found there as well.

On a side note:

I do have one suggestion for Online NW: please consider having a student rate. $130 is pretty spendy for a one-day conference, especially for those that may be poor graduate students or unemployed. (See: Public Library Association’s national conference in Portland this year — the student rate for the 4 day conference is only $90).

This video is from a study on how undergraduates seek information for research. I came across it by way of The Participatory Library Starter Kit. University of Washington iSchool faculty Alison Head, Mike Eisenberg and David Nasatir did the study. All three lead Project Information Literacy, a large scale study about early adults and their research habits.