If you are active on social media, you see a lot of news stories posted by your friends, family, and colleagues. This past election year saw a rise in very popular but unreliable news sites on both sides of the political spectrum. The s Chronicle of Higher Education (available online thanks to your friendly neighborhood academic library) profiles Melissa Zimdars, who is a mass-communications professor who has put together an excellent list of False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources. The list includes the following tips for analyzing news sources:

 

• Avoid websites that end in “lo” ex: Newslo. These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of
• satire or comedy).
• Watch out for websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources  
• Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more
• than one source reporting on a topic or event.
• Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.
• Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification.
• Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs).
• Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on Snopes or Wikipedia for more information about the source.
• Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources.
• If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
• If the website you’re reading encourages you to DOX individuals, it’s unlikely to be a legitimate source of news.
• It’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get a variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources not yet included in this list (although their practices at times may qualify them for addition), such as The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Fox News, vacillate between providing important, legitimate, problematic, and/or hyperbolic news coverage, requiring readers and viewers to verify and contextualize information with other sources.
• For more tips on analyzing the credibility and reliability of sources, please check out School Library Journal (they also provide an extensive list of media literacy resources).

If you would like more information about analyzing the credibility and reliability of sources, get in touch with one of our librarians. Faculty, we would be happy to help you put together information/media literacy resources or to do a workshop with your classes on the topic.

Happy in the Mountains

I have been a bad library blogger for months, now. I was working on SACS for the campus most of summer and the beginning this semester, and it feels like I am only now caught up on regular library work enough to do a little outreach.

So I'm just going to post a list of some of the wonderful things that are happening at Jones Library. If you have questions, email me or stop by the library--or comment below.

1. WE GOT THE GRANT! 

Two years' planning and work, and we are finally implementing our LSTA Lifelong Learning grant. Here's the abstract of the grant proposal:

Grant Category:         Project Literacy & Lifelong Learning

Institution/Library:       Brevard College

Project Description:
This project will create an experiential Learning Commons that focuses on student success, combining library and learning support services to improve formal student learning. The grant will help the library make the paradigm shift from traditional warehouse and lecture-oriented bibliographic instruction center to a user-centered experiential learning laboratory offering a wide variety of support services.

We've started buying technology and furnishings to support the project, and we will soon have some construction going on. The timeline is still TBD on that construction, but I promise to blog and write about this as things start to happen. We plan on grand opening the new Experiential Learning Commons at the beginning of fall semester 2017.

2. We have a new roof and painted and lighted cupola.

The library looks much spiffier with the cupola clean and lighted and the books are less damp than they have been. No more buckets in the stacks, either!

3. We're working on our information literacy curriculum

We are almost done with sessions for all of the FYE classes. We have been working on rolling out a full information literacy curriculum that will introduce different information research and evaluation ideas in different levels of classes. So if you are a faculty member and want to get papers with better sources or better citations, or you want to have your students talk about the politics of information with someone other than you, get in touch with Chilly. We can meet live with your class, create handouts and/or online resources, or even have a librarian embedded in your Sakai site. (And if you are a student, you should be happy to know that you will learn different things each time you come into the library with a class.)

4. We have interns for next semester!

We are incredibly excited that some of our soon-to-be graduates at Brevard are seriously considering careers in library science. We love our jobs and we think that library work, in all of its varied flavors, is a terrific career direction, so we are happy to support our students in learning more about what the job might actually entail. And, btw, "loving books" is less a pre-requisite than intellectual curiosity and flexibility. Libraries have changed a lot over the course of my career (yep, I typed catalog cards--on actual cards--in graduate school) and I expect that they will continue to evolve rapidly. Libraries are still community centers and hubs of information and learning. That information comes in very different forms than it used to, but it is still the basis of what we do.  Want to know more about jobs in libraries? See the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

5.  Light reading: New paperbacks

We've experimented a bit with different ways of providing light reading for the campus community. The Transylvania County Public Library is amazing, but it's handy to be able to grab a book without going downtown. Last year we tried a rental collection, but it didn't get much use for the amount of money we spent on it. Starting this fall, we have paperbacks available  for anyone to take. You don't have to check them out (so you don't have to worry about them being overdue), but we ask that you return them when you are done with them and donate your own paperbacks to be added to the collection.  We try to have a nice range of genre and literary fiction. 

6. We are busy

We are always busy, but our numbers are up in one-on-one appointments for senior projects and other work, and classes are checking out our technology (iPads, especially) on a pretty regular basis. It feels like we are doing important work at Brevard College and that our students are learning so very much.

Have I told you lately how happy I am working here? Thanks, BC.