Reading Assignment 2

“Information Navigation 101”

Since information has become so easily accessible and main website like Wikipedia.com and encylcodepia.com offer information free online it is believed that college students turn to these sources more than the original scholarly works that the libraries offer. The scholarly and peer reviewed works are often in databases now, libraries believe that it is essential to teach students how to navigate through the different databases to find relevant information quickly. Information literacy has become a highly discussed issue. It is hoped that students will begin to evaluate the information they find (mainly while researching) and to evaluate if the information is relevant and true. Information literacy also hopes to increase the knowledge about plagiarism. Information literacy hopes to emphasize the databases that are offered to students at the library and to be skeptical of the information they find over the internet. Some universities have developed tests to measure information literacy among their students. It is even believed that students should not be able to graduate without being information literate but not yet enforced. Personally I believe that professors often force us to use databases for research projects. They do this by only allowing one or two websites as references and requiring a certain number of articles from the databases. This may be because they do not believe students are capable of shifting through information obtained on the internet as being legitimate or not. I personally feel that this technique used by professors is not necessary. Students are capable of finding the appropriate material needed to conduct research. If the material can be accessed from a website versus a database I do not understand the harm in conducting research using the internet.