Ah, geez, I had a feeling that was becoming the case in schools - you’re right, it’s not

Ah, geez, I had a feeling that was becoming the case in schools - you’re right, it’s not fair to you all! Information literacy is such an important skill, especially now with the deluge of information we encounter daily due to the internet. My mom is an elementary school librarian and she teaches what she can, but based on what I’ve been hearing from her and seeing in general on the internet, I have a feeling things aren’t being taught as well as they should be, which makes me worried because this is a skill that can keep you all safe, too!Here’s a few things I, a library professional, like to do that make the patrons think I’m some kind of research god because I’m so good at finding things. Now you too can astound people with your ability to locate information!Booleans! I adore boolean operators. They make it a lot easier to narrow down information in a search engine. The three you really need to know are AND, OR, and NOT. You put your search terms themselves in quotation marks, especially if they’re multiple words long, and then use the booleans. To use an example that most people coming to my blog would be familiar with, let’s say you’re searching for Submas content, but you want it to be more specific. If we’re using Ingo and Emmet as the search terms, a boolean search to bring up both of them would look like “Ingo” AND “Emmet,” or “Ingo” OR “Emmet,” depending. If you wanted one or the other, put the one you’re looking for first, then NOT, and then the other one. Boolean operators are great when you’re trying to narrow down a search for more specific research. I can come up with extremely specific historical information from newspapers because I employ booleans.You can use Wikipedia, despite what your teachers have to tell you sometimes: Just scroll to the bottom and see what the sources used to write the article were! You’ll get a bunch of sources you can use for whatever you’re writing, and if you have trouble accessing them at home, there’s a good chance you can access them at your library through a database.Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine, and Google Scholar are all free resources you can use. I love them all so much, even if my most frequent use of the Wayback Machine is to prove to people that there used to be a website called Hats of Meat. Project Gutenberg is a great place to find books in the public domain, and Google Scholar is excellent for accessing academic articles for free. Another excellent one your library might have access to is HathiTrust, which was getting started up when I was in library school. Their digitized book collection is outstanding. And I don’t think SciHub needs any introduction at this point! Checking if a source is biased is a bit difficult in this day and age, but there’s always things that give it away. If the source is using inflammatory language or is clickbait-esque, there’s a good chance that source is trying to stir up people’s emotions in one direction or another. Finding a bunch of sources on the same topic from different viewpoints can actually help you look at an issue in ways you never have before. There’s a graph I keep on my phone to share with people that helps with evaluating the general leanings of common news sources:Obviously, this is a “your mileage may vary” graph, because a lot of these sources will have occasional guest pieces with different leanings, but this is overall a good basic guide. Academic sources are less likely to “have an agenda,” as they’re written for informational purposes, but studies are done to prove or dispute points, and they can also be twisted to someone’s narrative. (A good example is a recent study done proving autistic people are more likely to stick to their morals than neurotypical people, even if no one is watching; the people who published this study found a way to frame this negatively, because autism is still seen by many as a deficit.)Definitely collect as many articles and sources on a topic as you can - one article alone is just one viewpoint, and if it’s not written in a neutral way, you need to see what everyone else is saying to form a sound opinion instead of just accepting the first thing you read - it might not be true, or it might be biased! This is by no means an exhaustive guide, but if anyone needs help learning to research, this will hopefully be a good starting point for you! -- source link

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