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.

Easter Egg Hunt @ Jones Library

Eggs. Find them. Get Loot. Have Fun. March 21-March 24 only!

The Easter Bunny has hidden plastic eggs throughout the library. If you come and find them, you can have the chocolate hidden in them. If you are very lucky, you will get a coupon for a different kind of prize--maybe a gift card, maybe something else.

(And if you bring the egg back, we can fill it back up again and hide it for the next lucky person.)

November 2015 New Books

Here's a list of the new books added to the library's collections in November 2015.

Special kudos to our student worker extraordinaire (and future librarian!) Kari Horan, who put together this list and edited the publisher's summaries for brevity.

November New Books

View more lists from Marie Jones

Gamify your Semester

One of the skills I've cultivated over the years is converting boring or tedious tasks into relatively entertaining activities. Life is full of junk that has to be done--doing homework, grading papers, washing dishes, doing laundry. Some of it is fun in itself, like reading books for a class that you really love. But it helps to have some outside motivation to do the things that you consider boring.

Enter gamification.

Habitica

I just discovered this one, and I wish it had been around when I was a student.
(Who am I kidding, when I was a student, there were no "apps"--we played RPGs the old fashioned way, with dice and a human DM. And I, of course, was way to cool to be a D&D nerd. Not.)

Back to my point. Habitica is an RPG, with all the hallmarks of that kind of game--you design and upgrade your avatar, earn gold, fight monsters with raiding parties, join guilds.

If that sentence makes no sense to you, then skip down to Mindbloom, below. That game might be more up your alley.

But if you are all about RPGs, what if you could play one and NOT be wasting time? In Habitica, your "ToDo's" give you gold when you complete them. You choose your goals, the type of goals, and whether each one gives you a lot of gold or a little gold based on how hard they are for you. Then you can buy rewards with the gold you earn--weapons, armor, or new looks for your avatar.

Sound like fun? Check it out online first at habitica.com and then download the iOS or Droid app on your phone. (Go online first, because there is a quick tutorial and the interface is much easier to navigate...and you can't play with your avatar on the phone app).

Mindbloom

Mindbloom is a much more sensory experience, with inspirational music and images. There are no monsters to fight here. It is restful and lovely to put on your headphones and grow your tree each day. The "game" is to give your tree sun as you gain inspiration to complete your goals and give it rain as you complete specific actions. Then the tree grows, giving you seeds that allow you to change your Mindbloom experience. Mindbloom is very much a life coaching kind of experience, where you create branches for different parts of your life, including lifestyle, career, health, creativity, finance, relationships, and so on. For students, the career branch can include studying or whatever specific tasks you need to do in school.

Mindbloom's social tools fit the theme. You can see the forest of your friend's trees, and you can share with them or on social media your progress. It is perfectly possible to use Mindbloom effectively without social interaction, if you prefer that.

Mindbloom's mobile website supports use on your phone or other device* and the company has a whole range of related apps that I haven't explored yet.

Feel free to message me about your experience with these apps, or if you know of other gamification tools you'd recommend.

Have a great semester!

Addendum 1/15: I haven't successfully used Mindbloom mobile on my Samsung Note, but it does work on my iPad so there might be some issues with Android devices.

What We're Following: Welcome to Night Vale

         Dinner conversation wandered from the weather to traffic to the Faceless Old Woman to the Sheriff’s Secret Police. That is how I discovered Welcome to Night Vale, a bi-weekly podcast and series of novels written by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor. It turned out that “The Weather” and “Traffic” are regular segments on the show.
        The show’s premise is as a community-radio program reporting to a small fictional town. While this is a similar conceit to A Prairie Home Companion, Night Vale has more in common with Stephen King’s Derry or Lovecraft’s Arkham than Lake Wobegon. Our host Cecil (played by Cecil Baldwin) reports on mundane goings-on like the opening of the New Old Opera House, a plot to steal the Registry of Middle-School Crushes, or the escape of Antiques.
        Each episode is a self-contained story, so I was glad I didn’t have to catch up on years of backstory to jump into Night Vale. Despite Cecil and guest-stars like Wil Wheaton and Jackson Publick taking us through story arcs (Carlos does eventually return from the Desert Otherworld inside the Dog Park), it seems sometimes as if Night Vale - where screen actor Lee Marvin just turned 30 - will never change.
        Welcome to Night Vale is an absurd and surreal kind of comedy. It has occasionally raised the hair on my arms, to be sure, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to replay a segment I missed thanks to my own laughter. I’m glad to have its weirdness in my ears twice a month. If deadpan humor like The Addams Family or A Season of Unfortunate Events is something you enjoy, I suggest you take a trip to Night Vale as soon as you can.

What We're Reading: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

This blog entry is the first in a series of reviews of items in the J.A. Jones library collections. If you are interested in writing a review for this series, let me know. I'd love to see a variety of voices guest blogging here. Below is Nancy Williard's review of Harper Lee's controversial sequel/early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that was published this year. Let us know what you thought of this book in the comments--we'd love to talk about it.

And, if you want to read the book, you can find it in our rental book collection near the photocopier on the main floor of the library.

From Nancy Williard:

Aside from the intrigue of seeing what preceded the famous work by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, this earlier work is a fine story in itself. Jean Louise Finch, formerly “Scout”, is twenty-six, fresh from New York, and viewing her old hometown, Maycomb, Alabama, with the judgmenta
l eye. Through this visit the 1950’s Southern view of race relations is balanced against the more activist “color-blind” perception of the New Yorker that Jean Louise professes. The discussion of race relations is interesting to compare with the justification of Southern culture found in The Help, a more recent book set in the same time period. Scout’s headstrong rejection of Southern manners and sensibilities is as humorous and compelling as it was when Scout wore her overalls to town in To Kill a Mockingbird. Once again, Jean Louise, Scout, causes a social upheaval that involves many of our favorite characters, Calpurnia, Atticus, and Aunt Alexandra, and a new one, Henry “Hank” Clinton, a love interest. Although I found the ending lacking, I was fascinated to see where the seeds for To Kill a Mockingbird began.  What was kept and what was left out?