Evaluating Information (short-verions): Advantages of Print Resources (3:56).
Living in an information age is great. We have almost immediate access to so much. Digital
resources are great, but they don't replace print resources. There are important advantages
to using print publications like books, magazines, newspapers, and journals. This video,
only a few minutes, is an edited presentation from another of my library media videos:
Evaluating Information (Full-Version): A Simple Checklist.
Evaluating Information (Full-Version): A Simple Checklist (10:20).
When looking for information, we have so many choices today -- the Internet, electronic
databases, online forums, magazines, journals, books, and more! (NOTE: This is the
full-version of my Evaluating Information video -- I also have a short-version that is
edited down to emphasize the value of print resources). We need to make our choices
carefully. We need to evaluate information to ensure it is accurate, useful, and from
a source that is trustworthy. The good news is, this is not hard -- this video provides
a simple checklist for the following 8 areas
Research Skills: Keyword versus Subject Heading Searches (9:18).
Research is easy if you follow the lead of information specialists and librarians. They
organize databases, other electronic resources, and their book collections to identify
related concept. When you understand how they do this, researching even complex topics
becomes easy. Most of us are comfortable using keywords -- terms that may actually appear
in a given document or file. The problem with keyword searches is that different people
use different words for the same ideas. Information specialists and librarians organize
information by subject headings -- terms that are carefully chosen and controlled to build
links between different resources that can provide related information. By connecting
resources with carefully chosen terms that are used by other information specialists
and librarians around the world, it becomes quick and easy to locate what you need to
know.
Plagiarism and Citing Sources (9:26).
Teachers know their students. They know how typical students use language in general and
they know how each student uses language too. Teachers can see when someone has copied
and pasted a written assignment together. When written words are taken directly from
multiple sources -- it shows. Plagiarism is stealing someone else's work and representing
it as our own. In school, it can get us in trouble. But this video is about more than
plagiarism. It also reviews how to effectively cite sources and provides clear and
easy-to-follow examples of when to do so.
