Complete a one-to-two-page paper using the ALA's top ten list for Challenged and Banned Books (https://www.ala.org/bbooks) discuss the importance of intellectual freedom, censorship, and freedom of speech.
Use and additional two to three peer-reviewed articles to support your ideas. You may also discuss if you agree or disagree with certain books on the top ten list.
Information literacy emerged in the 1970s to address information needs in an active and critical way (Cuevas-Cerveró et al., 2023). Information literacy, as defined by Lloyd (2010) has three landscapes: landscapes: education, workplace and community. Landscapes are spaces created by people who co-participate in a field of practice. All landscapes are maintained through membership, much like communities observed with libraries are connected by one's individualization that they belong in such a community.
Information literacy was originally focused on promoting the skills that people needed to develop in the new information heavy world of the 1970s, the goal was to prevent there being any kind of inequality between information users (Cuevas-Cerveró et al., 2023). For this paper, information literacy refers to the core concepts of locating, evaluating, using, archiving and critical thinking about information. The importance of information literacy is no longer just a library-centric-concept, instead it is a critical competency that applies to all academic content (Mullins & Boyd-Barnes, 2024).
Information literacy is important because it is a skill set critical to life and work in the 21st century. Information literacy (IL) is much more than doing good research. While research is a large component, information literacy is a set of skills that allows one to think critically, ask good questions, know where to go to find answers, synthesize information, make informed decisions, and navigate the overabundance of information (digital and visual) that is part of our networked world. These are increasingly skills that employers expect graduates to bring to the workplace (Head, Van Hoeck, Eschler, & Fullerton, 2013; Weiner, 2011), and our students will graduate into a global, knowledge economy, where these skills are vital to one's success (Lloyd, 2003).
References
Head, A. J., Van Hoeck, M., Eschler, J., & Fullerton, S. (2013). What information competencies matter in today’s workplace? Library and Information Research, 37(114), 74–104. https://doi.org/10.29173/lirg557
Lloyd, A. (2003). Information Literacy. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 35(2), 87–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000603352003
Modern Librarian Memoirs. (2017). What is Information Literacy? In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbe6xBibOL4
Mullins, K., & Boyd-Byrnes, M. (2024). Academic Librarians’ Contribution to Information literacy Instruction and Learning. College & Research Libraries, 85(3), 423. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.85.3.423
Smith, R. L. (2024). Philosophical shift: Teach the faculty to teach information literacy. Ala.org. http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/whitepapers/nashville/smith
Weiner, S. (2011). Information literacy and the workforce: A review 34(2), (pp. 7–14). Education Libraries. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ961219.pdf