the Library Channel

Image by Wim Mulder, used under the Creative Commons license.

Now this is interesting — I certainly wasn’t expecting this, though I think it’s a positive development. President Obama has declared October to be the National Information Literacy Month. (Information literacy is a fancy term for the ability to find information and evaluate its level of quality, authority, etc). The President’s press release notes the issue of information overload, and champions info literacy as a skill set that allows a person to avoid irrelevant information and, conversely, to find and evaluate useful information:

Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communication technologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking. National Information Literacy Awareness Month highlights the need for all Americans to be adept in the skills necessary to effectively navigate the Information Age.

Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it. Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. At the same time, Americans have unprecedented access to the diverse and independent sources of information, as well as institutions such as libraries and universities, that can help separate truth from fiction and signal from noise.

To this I’ll add that the Meriam Library plays a similar role. Certainly we provide information (and the tools to find that information), but we also offer tools to help you find and evaluate information. I’m both surprised and pleased to hear the same message coming from the office of the President as well. I’m also curious if you have any thoughts on either the presidential declaration or on info literacy in general — leave a comment below .

Contributed by Aaron Bowen

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.