I wonder if this is how Buffy felt the night before graduation day #snakedemon
We reaffirm
“We would like to reaffirm our commitment to long-standing library traditions and values, which include the promotion of intellectual freedom, the protection of information from loss or erasure, and the mindful and critical use of information.”
Source: LMU Library News
Can you make a flier for that?
“I stopped making 8.5-by-11-inch fliers this semester and I haven’t regretted it for a single moment.” My latest post for Programming Librarian. (Not really: I’ve printed a few flyers, but it’s no longer part of my standard workflow.)
My Fitbit recommended that I lower my daily step count goal by 2000 steps. My Fitbit is managing my expectations.
What librarians do
“Approaching a question with an open mind, being willing to let evidence (not raw opinion, emotion, or group affinity) influence what you think, being committed to a method for truth-seeking that minimizes bias and harm, and doing this for the public good, not out of self-interest.”
Source: Library Babel Fish
Aletheia has started dreaming. Last night, she had a dream that a baby skeleton was eating her toes. Gods, that’s terrifying.
Happiness is buying eggnog on a whim and then discovering a misplaced bottle of rum in the cabinet.
Aletheia is giving me grief for not putting up xmas lights on the house. So this is how it begins.
Reliability of a source is not binary
A few of us at mpow have been talking about ways to put more “science” into library science, mostly in the context of using more robust research methods to study user behavior and assess library services. With that in mind, Lane Wilkinson’s recent post on using Bayesian inference to understand how users contextualize the credibility of an information source strikes me as a particularly useful thought experiment (if not an actual research agenda… which you should totally do, Lane!). There is one insight in particular that caught my attention:
“Values like credibility, reliability, or trustworthiness are not binary; they exist on a continuum between 0 and 100%. We need to stop asking ‘is this source reliable?’ and start asking ‘how reliable is this source given what it is reporting?'”
If there is one thing I could help our students to understand right now, this would be it. Perhaps simply framing the question of credibility in this way is enough to inspire them to be more critical of what they read via their everyday information consumption. One can hope.