Competency in Information Literacy

Students who are competent in this area are able to conduct research for a particular topic of interest using today's information tools and resources. They should be able to pursue a research topic by locating and attaining necessary documents and information, knowing the difference between quality and faulty information, interpreting the information they have gathered and applying it to their work. Also, they should be able to synthesize what they find in order to communicate their topic thoroughly.

Research sources range from electronic sources to more traditional means of research such as reading books or articles on microfilm or in books at a designated library. Most importantly:

• Students should be able to know how to find reliable secondary information.
• Students should be literate in all of the options available for research.

My first proof of competency in this area is the secondary sources that I gathered for an essay, using the services available through the Egan Library. The teacher required that the sources must be from journals and the like, and could not be websites. In order to track down these sources I had to look on online journal searches like JSTOR, as well as microfilm.

My second proof of competency in this area involves a group project I did during the first section of British Literature (Medieval to Neoclassic). Our assignment was to conduct a mock revision of the Norton literary cannon, in which we would select texts to include that were not already in there, and to balance that by taking out the exact number of pages we were putting in. This project involved extensive research to pick the best text to add into the Norton. The text attached is an annotated bibliography of my research.