Here at the d'Alzon Library, we try to keep up with the latest news related to student learning, information or digital literacy, and resource evaluation.

Each month, we'd like to share with you some of our favorite recent reads. Enjoy!



Information Literacy in the Sciences: Faculty Perception of Undergraduate Student Skill. By Heather Brodie Perry. College & Research Libraries vol. 78 no. 7. 2017. 

Interviews of teaching faculty in the sciences from several Boston-area colleges provide insights into faculty perceptions of student research skills.  Students' inability to effectively evaluate sources was among the most common concerns.

Accessibility for Justice: Accessibility as a Tool for Promoting Justice in Librarianship. By Stephanie Rosen. In the Library With the Lead Pipe: An Open Access, Open Peer Reviewed Journal. November 29, 2017.

A discussion of the limitations of "diversity" initiatives, and suggested use of "accessibility" rhetoric to better describe ongoing efforts to ensure equity in access to information and library services.

Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit. By Maria Glenski, Corey Pennycuff, and Tim Weninger. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems vol. 4 no. 4. December 2017.

Study found Reddit users usually do not view an article before upvoting/downvoting it.  Data supports ongoing need for a critical eye when considering crowd-sourced ratings of information sources.

Prepare for the New Paywall Era. By Alexis C. Madrigal. The Atlantic. November 30, 2017. 

As content distributors (i.e., Google, Facebook) see the majority of ad revenue, content generators (newspapers) take another look at paywalls.

Practicing Digital Literacy in the Liberal Arts: A Qualitative Analysis of Students' Online Research Journals. By Jennifer Jarson and Lora Taub-Pervizpour. Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy. May 24, 2017.

Describes an undergraduate course in which students are required to create an online photo journal to document their research process.  The assignment is intended to help students analyze and synthesize sources, and reflect on their roles as both producers and consumers of information.

The Black Box Problem. By Barbara Fister. Barbara Fister: Librarian, Writer, Friendly Curmudgeon. November 16, 2017. 

Librarian Barbara Fister, long an advocate for teaching information literacy, wonders how to help students decide what is reliable information.  Many of the old formulas no longer work and even trained historians have difficulty evaluating information efficiently.

 Academic Journal Publishing is Headed for a Day of Reckoning. By Patrick Burns. The Conversation: Academic Rigor, Journalistic Flair. November 5, 2017.

Patrick Burns, Dean of Libraries at Colorado State University and author of this article writes: "Access to journals is crucial for how researchers do their work.  But few research libraries can afford all the journal subscriptions needed by all of their faculty for all occasions.  As the dean of libraries at a state school, I contend that the economic model for academic journal publications is broken."