Information Literacy
In This Chapter
Learning Objectives
- Gain awareness of the types of sources that make up our information environment
- Use different characteristics of a source to determine how it might be useful to your research
Summary
Sources can be categorized in many different ways. A common, but not very useful way is to categorize them by format, like print vs. online, or books vs. articles. But we can gain a better understanding of a source if we understand how to categorize it according to what kind of creator made it or what processes were involved in its creation.
There are a lot of different ways to categorize sources. In the chapter Identifying a Topic, we mentioned two of them: a source can be categorized according to who the intended audience is (expert or popular,) or a source can be categorized according to its scope (a small piece of a topic or a synthesis of a whole field.) But there are many, many ways to categorize sources, and when it comes to figuring out whether or not or how to use a source, some categories are more useful than others. Here are some we will consider in this chapter:
- Format: What does the source look like? (ex: books, periodicals, videos, etc.)
- Creator: Who created the source? (ex: governments, journalists, researchers, etc.)
- Gatekeeping: What controls were used in the creation of the source? (peer-review, editorial control, etc.)
Knowing what sources exist is a key step on the way to gaining perspectives of others. From the Habits of Mind chapters you might remember that every message is created and received within a cultural and historical context. Understanding how messages are created and by whom will help us understand their context.
Format
One of the most common ways we talk about different kinds of sources is their format. Print vs online is one way to categorize sources by format, but other common format categories include:
- Books: includes categories like encyclopedias, anthologies
- Periodicals: includes categories like newspapers, magazines, & scholarly journals
- Websites
- Videos
As you can see, even when we categorize sources by their format, there’s no one right way to do it. (Also, any book or periodical can be available in either print or online, so the print and online categories aren’t very useful.) Because many different kinds of creators can create a source in any format, format isn’t a particularly useful characteristic in evaluating a source. Knowing the format also doesn’t tell you anything about the gatekeeping that was used in its creation.
Format is useful when you’re deciding where to search. As we’ll discuss in the next chapter, Access & Searching, you would likely use a different search platform to find a book than you would to find an article from a periodical.
Another way that the idea of format can be useful is by knowing what kinds of information tends to show up in what kinds of formats. Information about very recent events will show up first in daily or week