1 - Information Literacy 050030 PDF

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Study Unit

Information Literacy By Lauré Mackey Revised and Updated By Erin Greech

About the Author Lauré Mackey is an independent information research specialist and adjunct librarian from northern Virginia. In 1992, she received her master’s degree in library science from Syracuse University. She has had wide professional and educational experience working in corporate libraries, academic libraries, school libraries, and online libraries.

About the Reviser Erin Greech is an instructor at Penn Foster College and Career School. She received a B.A. and honors in English from The Pennsylvania State University and a master’s degree in education from Bloomsburg University. In addition to teaching at Penn Foster, Erin also works as an adjunct English professor and has done independent editing for several children’s books.

All terms mentioned in this text that are known to be trademarks or service marks have been appropriately capitalized. Use of a term in this text should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.

Copyright © 2013 by Penn Foster, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to Copyright Permissions, Penn Foster, 925 Oak Street, Scranton, Pennsylvania 18515. Printed in the United States of America 08/05/14

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Information is available everywhere we turn, from many sources and in many different formats. Each day, we have the opportunity to enrich our lives with information from sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, television, videos, radio programs, Internet websites, online databases, friends, colleagues, and more. Just listening to and reading facts isn’t enough to make us “information literate,” however. To be literate with information, you must know why, when, and how to use all of the various tools and resources of information as well as how to think critically about the information they provide. No one can become information literate overnight. When you learned to draw, speak, and write, your abilities improved over time. In the same way, your abilities with information literacy will improve as you gain expertise in the topics you choose to investigate and as you practice searching for, selecting, and evaluating the information and ideas you encounter. While you’re taking college classes, you’ll need to research information for papers and other assignments. Once you graduate, you’ll still rely on your research skills to make informed decisions in your job and in your personal life. The skills you have and continue to develop will make the process of finding information for your assignments, your work, and your life much easier. The primary purpose of this study unit is to teach you to find and use information at libraries and other information centers and through electronic resources available on the World Wide Web. Note: For this course, you’ll take two online, multiple-choice examinations. The first focuses on the information in the study unit. The second requires practical application of that information and acts as your graded project. No written project or research assignment is required.

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When you complete this study unit, you’ll be able to •

Search the World Wide Web and retrieve the most relevant documents

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Use the various search engines available online

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Create effective search statements

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Interpret the search results to select the best possible resources related to the topic

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Determine the reliability of sources

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Interpret call numbers and document classification systems to easily locate books, periodicals, and other documents within a library

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Explain how to use a variety of print reference sources

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Recognize the ethical and legal issues surrounding copyrighted information

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Understand plagiarism and how to prevent it, including the legal issues that surround plagiarized information

Remember to regularly check “My Courses” on your student homepage. Your instructor may post additional resources that you can access to enhance your learning experience.

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THE INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB Introduction

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The Internet The World Wide Web

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Uniform Resource Locators

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Search Engines

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SEARCH STRATEGIES

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Search Commands Search Strategies

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Keyword Searching

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Title and Author Searching

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Introduction to Boolean Searching

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Nesting Searches

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Truncation and Wildcard Characters

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REFERENCE SOURCES

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Reference Sources Defined

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Making the Most of a Reference Source

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Almanacs

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Atlases

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Bibliographies

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Biographical Sources

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Dictionaries

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Thesauruses Encyclopedias

39 40

Literary Criticism Sources

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Statistical Sources

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Types of Sources: Primary and Secondary

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PERIODICALS AND JOURNALS Periodical and Newspaper Indexes

47 47

Expanded Academic ASAP

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Understanding and Reading Citations

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Periodicals, Journals, and Magazines— How Are They Different?

LIBRARY COLLECTIONS

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The Reference Collection

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The Circulating Collection

66

Periodicals

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Contents

What Is a Database?

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Microforms

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Government Documents

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Electronic Resources

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LOCATING INFORMATION WITHIN THE LIBRARY Call Numbers

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Library Classification Systems

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Dewey Decimal Classification System

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The Library of Congress System

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Superintendent of Documents System

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EVALUATING INFORMATION

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Evaluating Information from Library Sources

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Evaluating World Wide Web Sources

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USING INFORMATION IN RESEARCH PROJECTS Copyright Law

90 90

Trademark

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Fair Use

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Avoiding Plagiarism

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Citing Sources in Research Papers

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Citation Guide

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GLOSSARY SELF-CHECK ANSWERS

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Contents

Information Literacy

THE INTERNET AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB Introduction The information available to people today is endless. With multimedia and technology expanding daily, people have knowledge at their fingertips like never before in history. And they can access information everywhere and every day, from countless sources and in multiple formats. Traditional books, magazines, and newspapers are no longer the only sources of information. Today, people have access to television, websites, and social networks, with information being streamed every minute to the palms of their hands. People can also have information in libraries delivered to their computers, tablets, and smart phones (Figure 1). The information that was once housed solely inside a large building is now available to you instantly. Books, magazines, journals, newspapers, and historic archives are accessible in mere seconds. With all of this information and technology available to conduct research, you may wonder how you can determine where to begin. This course is designed not only to teach you about the many resources available to you, but to inform you about how to properly use them. Just having information doesn’t make you information literate; you must understand how to use all of the tools you’ve been given.

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FIGURE 1—Libraries can deliver some of their material directly to your computer, tablet, or smart phone.

At this point, you may be asking yourself why you should learn how to access and use this information. First, while taking your college classes, you’ll need to conduct research— and research is all about finding and using information. Then, after you graduate, you’ll need these research skills not only for your job, but also to help you find a job. No matter what task you undertake—developing a research project, making a meal, building a birdhouse—you must start at the beginning with the proper tools for the task at hand. No chef can prepare a meal without the necessary tools. Similarly, a great researcher can’t complete his or her research without the proper information. With that being said, let’s begin at the beginning of the process of gathering information from a variety of sources.

What Is a Database? You may frequently hear the term database, but you may never have given much thought to what it means. Simply put, a database is a compilation of information (Figure 2). A database may be very small (like the phone numbers in your cell phone) or large (like the phone book for New York City) or very large (like the vast array of websites on the Internet). Websites hold information (data) for any topic you can imagine, and your phone holds information, such as your contact information or even your personal information. Both of these items are databases because they hold a record of something.

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Information Literacy

FIGURE 2—Something as simple as a desktop address file is considered a database, because it holds a compilation of information.

Such databases are invaluable when you need to find information, because they hold the information you need. Records and files, such as addresses, magazine articles, journal articles, books, speeches, video recordings, previous research on a topic, recent findings on a subject, and historic data, are housed in databases. Your job is to find the information you need. To do that, you must conduct a database search.

The word data (plural for datum) refers to individual facts, statistics, or items of information.

On a computer, you can perform a database search by typing a word or a phrase into a search bar (Figure 3). The computer then examines every Internet file and provides a list of those files that match the word or phrase you’ve typed. An infinite amount of information is available, especially on the Internet, and this information is constantly being updated, every minute of every day. Therefore, a search you perform one day may not yield the same results the next day, because information on your chosen field may have changed. For example, suppose you’re researching information on Alzheimer’s disease. Because researchers are continually learning new facts about this disease, the information on the Internet will change to reflect those updates and advancements.

Information Literacy

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FIGURE 3—To begin a search, simply type your topic into the search bar. In this illustration, the researcher is looking for information on Alzheimer’s disease.

The interface (what you see on the screen) and the computer software used to search these databases can vary widely. However, the basic skills needed for all databases are similar. Once you learn some basic search skills, you should then be able to apply them to most databases. Having the right skills can make the difference between finding eight books or eighty books on a particular subject. It’s much easier to locate and scan through eight books. You’ll be more likely to find substantial and relevant information when you’ve learned to use a good search strategy.

Expanded Academic ASAP Expanded Academic ASAP is an online periodical database available to you as a Penn Foster student. As you begin to use this tool, you’ll discover that its interface is plain and rather straightforward. As with most online databases, help is easy to locate directly on the screen. You’ll learn more about the Expanded Academic ASAP tool later in this study unit.

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Information Literacy

The Internet The Internet is a computer network made up of thousands of smaller networks, located all over the world. All of these networks use a common set of communication protocols. No one owns or controls the Internet because it’s comprised of cooperating but independent networks. The Internet is filled with a vast amount of information. In fact, no one knows how many individual files are available on the Internet. In addition, the Internet is being updated every second of every day, so the amount of information is always expanding. The Internet is a self-publishing vehicle. In other words, anyone with a small amount of technical skill can publish his or her work online. Sites created by experts in a given field generally contain information that’s accurate and useful, while other sites created by amateurs may contain information that’s not fully accurate or dependable. In addition, websites change over time according to the commitment level of the creators and contributors. For example, the contributors to Wikipedia are constantly updating information on the site. However, anyone who is a member of Wikipedia can contribute to the website, thus compromising the information available. Because of this arrangement, Wikipedia has become one of the most up-to-date websites available, but also one of the most unreliable. As you’re conducting research, make sure to check the dates on all of the documents you use to make sure they’re current. In addition, remember that not all of the information you’ll need for your research will be available to you on the Internet. You may also have to use the resource of a library. (We’ll be discussing library research shortly.)

Information Literacy

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Here are some of the useful sources you might find on the Internet: • News and current affairs • Databases of reference material • Laws, government announcements, and parliamentary debates • Company reports and public financial information • General information On the other hand, don’t assume that anything you might want to know is available for free on the Internet. That simply isn’t true. A great deal of information isn’t available on the Internet at all, or it may be available only if you’re willing to pay for it. Here are some examples of information that may not be readily available on the Internet: • Full text of copyrighted materials • A book for a research project • Rare historic documents, especially specific to your geographic region • Articles published in scholarly journals • Periodical databases Some or all of this information may be available online, but you may need to pay in order to access the material you’re looking for.

The World Wide Web The World Wide Web (or simply the Web) is a system of Internet servers connected together, thus making it possible for us to retrieve information. It was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Switzerland. An extensive user community has developed on the Web since its public introduction in 1991.

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Information Literacy

The Web uses hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), which is currently the most common way to search the Internet. Documents that include hypertext contain cross-references, or links. With the aid of an interactive browser program, such as Google or Yahoo, these links allow readers to move easily from one document to another. Other Internet protocols are file transfer protocol (FTP), gopher, telnet, and electronic mail (e-mail). The initial purpose of the Web was to use networked documents to enable communication among its members who were located in universities and research centers in several different countries. Word soon spread beyond CERN about the usefulness of the Web, and its growth became monumental. The use of the Web has now reached global proportions, since it enables documents that contain not only text but also graphics, audio, and video to be exchanged over the Internet.

Internet or World Wide Web? Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably, but in fact, they’re not the same. They are two separate but related things. The Internet is a massive network of networks—a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as both are connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols. The World Wide Web is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It’s an information-sharing model that’s built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. The Web also uses browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, to access Web documents.

Information Literacy

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Information on the Web is arranged on web pages and stored on computers known as servers, which are connected to the Internet. The first page in a set of web pages is known as the homepage, and the whole set of web pages makes up what’s known as the website. To find the information on a website, you must use a browser, which is software designed to search the Internet. A browser interprets code in a document and then displays the document on your computer screen in a formatted page. Most web browsers use a graphical user interface (GUI), which allows the browser to retrieve and display graphics, images, and pictures along with the text. With GUI, browsers can use pictures rather than words to represent the programs’ input and output. The program displays certain icons, buttons, and other images in its windows on the screen. The user controls it mainly by moving a pointer on the screen and selecting certain objects. Popular GUI browsers include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. Text-only browsers don’t have the capability to display images and graphics. LYNX is one text-based browser still in existence. Researchers use it to test the capabilities of websites to perform basic searches. When a user clicks on hypertext words or images, web browsers navigate from one web page to another. In a hypertext system, keywords and even images in a document are linked to other documents, images, videos, and sounds. Links may or may not follow a logical path, since each connection is programmed by the creator of the document. A professional developer should produce logical links, whereas an amateur developer may not. To produce hypertext for the Web, developers use hypertext markup language (HTML) to create documents. With HTML, they place tags within the text to format the document— creating visual features such as font size, italics, bold letters, and hypertext links. Graphics may also be incorporated into an HTML document. HTML is an evolving language, with new tags being added as each upgrade of the language is developed and released.

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Information Literacy

Uniform Resource L...