Advanced Information Literacy

This module includes the course welcome. It also covers the concept of formal and informal information sources in an open scholarship environment (ie. alternative publishing platforms, open access, and paid/proprietary subscriptions). Students will understand the economic and political realities of disseminating information at the federal and global levels. They will also evaluate the information sources they consult for currency, relevancy, authority, accuracy, and bias.

Information has value, therefore, it must be properly cited to avoid plagiarism. Students learn how to organize their project’s references, and properly employ citation conventions using citation management tools and style manuals to avoid plagiarizing. Students learn how multimedia is licensed for reuse with varying degrees of restriction using Creative Commons licensing. They learn how to provide attribution to various scholarly multimedia (images, audio records, and videos) they consult, as well as how to license their own work.

This module covers brainstorming your initial project idea to create a compelling and manageable research statement. Students will then learn to identify keywords from the statement for purposes of searching and expand upon those words using synonyms. Advanced Boolean, truncation, wildcard, and phrasal searching will also be covered.

In this module you will employ the search strategies you have developed in module three and search relevant information sources (databases, organizational websites, government repositories, and alternative platforms) using advanced database search tools such as controlled vocabulary, cited references, and bibliography mining. You will use the citation management tool of your choice from module two.