Shelf Life: Information Overload

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“We have no control over how search engines inform us,” cautions Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 16, 2009). “Google’s business is to supply the information that most people want, most of the time. How the company decides whether a particular result is No. 1 or No. 100,000 is part of Google’s secret recipe. . . . It is hard to think of anything else that we depend on so heavily yet know so little about.”

Eland believes that media literacy should be a high school requirement, which seems like a no-brainer—10 or 20 years ago, even. For now, it seems that burden is being shouldered by school librarians, which would be a more promising scenario if they weren’t often among the first heads on districts’ budgetary chopping blocks.

For the out-of-school, significant information literacy can be gleaned from public librarians, who are info-literate by trade. Yes, even in this digital age—especially in this digital age—librarians are often the best place to start. They’re at reference desks and Radical Reference (www.radicalreference.info), on instant messenger and telephone, behind brightly colored “Ask a Librarian!” buttons on library websites. They’ll help you cut through the clutter and send you back into the world with a few literacy skills you didn’t even know you needed.

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