First year Seminar - Information Literacy Guide

The OWU instruction librarians created this guide to supplement your course materials as you begin to explore information in preparation for your information literacy assignment. If a librarian visits your class, they may use one or all of the pages of this guide during the session. However, the guide is designed for you to explore on your own to help familiarize yourself with the concepts needed for your information literacy assignment. 

Every time you read, watch or listen to a source ask yourself the following questions:

• Where did this text come from?
• What kind of information does the author use to support their argument?
• What is the author trying to do with this text?
• When would this text be helpful?

As you explore how different disciplines think about migration, you are digesting a lot of information. How you make sense of all of this information is information literacy (how you find, evaluate, and use information). 

As you work through your assignments in the First Year Seminar, you are starting on your journey to becoming an information-literate person.

An information-literate individual is able to:

• recognize expertise, while maintaining skepticism over the inherent biases of the power systems that categorize expertise. 
• determine their information needs and which type of information source meets their needs. 
• use sources ethically, while recognizing the limits of the information creation process to value all voices equally. 
• articulate their information needs with questions in varying levels of complexity. 
• incorporate multiple perspectives while adding their own voice to the scholarly conversation in their discipline. 
• employ complex and varied search methods, whereby they accept that a good search will include “failed” searches and will persist to further exploring their questions. 

You won't learn everything you need to know in this course. But you will start practicing with the first three of these characteristics.