These standards provide guidance for information literacy instruction in science and technology disciplines. Sometimes these disciplines are grouped together for convenience and called STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A revision of these Standards is underway to align them with the new Framework for Information Literacy.

Which sources are typically considered appropriate for college research?

Why is your teacher an authority? Once an authority, always an authority? How did the authorities become authorities?

Call numbers are used to organize books in the library. This in-depth look at what a call number is and how to use one to find a book on the shelf will help you locate the books you need.

Not all research assignments are the same, but knowing more about the common elements of a research assignment can help you focus your work.

Your professor may have assigned a research project, but put some limitations on the types of sources you can use. You may have been told to use articles, but only scholarly articles. Articles can come from a variety of types of sources. How can you tell the difference? This guide helps you to distinguish articles from scholarly, trade, and popular sources.

When you have the freedom to choose your own research topic, it can be tough to know where to start. This video from Pfau Library (California State University, San Bernardino) gives you some useful tips for defeating the “Topic Monster.”

Not all citation resources are created equal. This guide includes details of many librarian-approved tools to help you with your citations.

If you would like a quick refresher of the elements of citations, take a look at this guide. Remember, different citation styles have their own formats, but convey the same information.

Taking on college research for the first time can be confusing and intimidating. This tutorial will guide you through what you already know about research and how to apply that to this new research context. 

Though this video is intended for a younger audience, it provides a fun and helpful guide to a useful strategy for narrowing or expanding your search for information known as concept mapping.

The compilation of links on this page is for faculty and students who wish to find out how current copyright law affects their use of intellectual property.

Consider the collaborative, rapidly evolving nature of information creation, especially in online social environments.

This important resource provides information about new and fast-growing field in information science that involves data management. With the exponential growth of data available online it is an especially valuable material that can provide help in many research projects.

Employers expect new graduates to have certain information/research abilities. How do recent graduates fare? Learn about some key changes you can make to your information practices from college to meet employers’ expectations. This short video presents the major findings from Project Information Literacy’s study about college graduates solving information problems in the workplace. You can read the full report here.

Cat video, anyone? It’s a lead-in to an activity from the Metaliteracy Badging system that will walk you through primary and secondary sources, and introduce some conundrums about categorizing sources. The title, Degrees of Separation, refers to how close one is to the information, and may be a useful way to think about primary vs. secondary. Contact Trudi Jacobson for details on how to take full advantage of the interactive features of this site.

This tutorial introduces you to what employers are looking for in regard to 21st century (or soft) skills, and the importance of information literacy in this regards.

Developed by librarians at Johns Hopkins University, this guide provides both practical advice on evaluating sources and a selection of case studies to help to distinguish accurate information from propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.

This guide offers tips for evaluating the quality of content on the Web. The Web is a rich environment of Web pages, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, free research services, media types and more. It can be a challenge to figure out which content to trust. This guide will help you to identify the type of site you are visiting and to evaluate its content.

A blog is a Web‐based journal entry platform that can accept reader comments. A wiki is a publishing platform on which many people can contribute new content and revise existing content. 

These are Web sites that provide research materials or links to these materials. 

Multimedia encompasses non‐textual presentations such as audio, video, and Flash formats. 

Open Access repositories store copies of scholarly and research materials that are available for public use.

Social bookmarks are links saved on Web sites that allow users to annotate, tag, and share them with other users.

Social networking sites are online communities in which members can interact in a number of ways.