 Today we have Jessica Hagman who's going to tell us about the Information Literacy Workshop. Hey Jessica. Hey Shay. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. So can you tell everyone what you do here in Alden? So I am the social media coordinator which means I'm usually on the other side of the screen when we're doing these live videos. I'm excited to be talking to everyone today on the other side of the camera. And also a social media coordinator for Scripps College which means that I work with students and faculty in that college to make sure that they have information that they need by building the collection and also answering questions and helping them find information for research and other projects. That's awesome. So tell us a bit about the Information Literacy Workshop that's going on this week. Sure. So we're calling it Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World because as many of you are probably aware this idea of fake news has very much come to the forefront recently. Actually if you're on our website there's a blog post about the event which lists some statistics from the Pew Research Center about how many, a very large number of Americans right now feel that this idea of fake news is causing confusion within the country about what constitutes even basic facts, especially in the political realm. So we are hosting what we're calling a networking event with the idea being that we could bring together people from the Ohio University community and also the Athens Area community, people who are also interested in this idea because of course librarians, we care a lot about information and access to accurate, reliable information and what we call information literacy. But we know that there are lots of people, parents, teachers, librarians at public schools or at public libraries, just community members, politicians. There are lots of people who are interested in this topic and we really wanted to bring together people for discussion as well as what we call a networking event so that they can hopefully connect with other people who are interested in that same topic and leave with a better sense of what events we might want to host going forward, either at the library or elsewhere in Athens or in the community, basically just to bring people together to work on whatever they want to work on related to news access and fake news and information literacy. So you did mention the fake news, so what would be an example of that for people who really don't kind of know what that is or what that means? So that's tricky because of course fake news is a pretty loaded term. I'm sure you've heard it thrown around by people. I guess when we think of it, we think of it as deliberately false information that is passed around. So I think there are some people who do engage in that practice intentionally. As a librarian, I personally also think it's important that we think about news that is not demonstrably false but maybe biased or doesn't tell the complete story or what happens when we think we just get our information worse. So if all of your information about politics, for example, comes from people who are like you on Facebook, you may be getting kind of a distorted picture. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what do you do as a subject librarian to ensure that you can keep up with that and make sure the information that people are receiving isn't just accurate and not that's your point of view? So I think just by talking about it is one thing that we can, that's the important thing, is I think we need to all be aware that, I don't think at this point anyone thinks that everything on the internet is true, but to realize that there is a lot of biased information and that we are all biased and the information that we seek and the information that we pay attention to. So as a librarian, when students come into a class with me, something I would talk about is, okay, we've encountered this information. Do we know who it comes from? Who gets to kind of be the expert on this topic? Are there some voices we're not hearing from? And how can we find those voices? Or if we do find something that we think is maybe not true, how would we see if we can, or maybe not the whole picture, see if we can find more information to supplement that picture or to think about mostly just finding more information. And how does our own kind of political point of view or our point of view in the world influence what information we're getting? So basically just encouraging people to use strategies and tools to get a broader picture of the world and more reliable information when it's important. Okay. And besides the workshop that you guys put on, what tip, if you had issues like one good key tip, should a student or someone like searching the internet, how can they just filter out that fake news? So like a helpful tip for that. Oh, that's a good question. I think there's not one thing you can do that's always going to work. I guess I would say just being aware of your own bias. Like I was saying a little bit before, like so I have a political point of view and so information that kind of supports that point of view is more appealing to me. And I think everyone has that. And it's not just politics. It could be anything. We all have a point of view about everything. So I would say, I guess this isn't really one thing, but to, and to be, sorry, I cannot limit myself to one thing. Same. Yeah. So to be aware of your bias and to recognize that if something seems too good to be true, maybe it's time to take a look for some other sources to support that and see if you can get a different story or the same story to kind of, you know, if it seems like it could potentially be biased to see if you can find other information or that same story from a different perspective and compare those and basically just to not take whatever information you get first as the absolute truth with a capital T and to really reflect them about what you're looking for. Thank you. Thank you. So when is the event? It's tomorrow from 5.30 to 7 on the fourth floor of Alden Library. It is completely free and open to anyone who wants to attend at the university or Athens, any community member who's interested. We will have some discussion tables and then also be collecting contact information for anyone who wants to keep working on these issues and Do you need tools? Anybody need simmering or open mind? Open mind, always important. But you know something to write with and really that's it. It will be, yeah, write something to write with because they may want to take notes. But it's, yeah, it'll be pretty low key to start off with, but we're excited to talk to people about this topic. So I'm going to need to register or anything. You don't have to. You can register online. There's a Facebook event you can find on our page and we'll put the link in the comments here. You can register just, especially if you can't make it, you could register and then we'll put you on our list to get further information or next time we have an event or something like that. But you don't have to. You can also just show up at 5.30 tomorrow and we will have snacks of some kind if that is any sort of inducement. All right, awesome. Well, thank you, Jessica. If you guys have any other questions, you can make any comments in the comment box below. This will be going on YouTube as well. So any opinions, any comments, we'll get back to you. See you at the workshop.