Information Literacy

If it is true that we live in an "information age," what is equally true and particularly relevant to college students is the fact that there can be a wide gulf between "information" and knowledge. Indeed, particularly since college writers now operate in an environment where research and access to information have been made so much easier by technology, it is more important than ever to understand the difference between the two. If information could be described as raw data and unprocessed evidence and opinions, knowledge is what is created by processing, learning, synthesizing, digesting, and applying that information.

Or we could put this another way: It is quite easy to get access to information nowadays (research can be conducted in your pajamas while lying on the couch, which was not an option for your professors back in their day); however, it is no easier to become knowledgeable than it was at any other time in the past. It may even be more difficult now, given the amount of misinformation easily accessible via electronic research.

All of this is what makes the notion of information literacy so vitally important in the present day. Generally speaking, information literacy has to do with the extent to which one possesses the ability to not only access, but also evaluate, understand, and effectively and ethically use that information in a project (such as a research paper, for example) that demonstrates and advances one's own knowledge on a given subject.

Your English professors, and all of your professors here at BCC, are committed to creating an environment where information literacy is encouraged, emphasized, and valued. The links below direct you to sites created by BCC and CUNY to help you assess and enhance your information literacy.

Here is a page detailing the information literacy goals proposed by the librarians of CUNY.

Check out this page of the BCC Library site, which offers a number of useful tutorials on using our research databases, as well as interesting Powerpoint presentations on advanced Internet searching and on detecting and avoiding misinformation online.

This excellent page from Hostos Community College contains a series of tutorials (with versions in both English and Spanish) covering the various aspects of information literacy, and each tutorial also features a quiz that allows you to test your competence in that area and report results back to yourself and/or your instructor.