FYEX 1000 First Year Experience: Information Literacy Assignment

What is Information Literacy Anyway?

Lakeland has included information literacy as a set of skills every student should know upon graduation. It is defined as:

Uses Information Effectively

   The 21st Century learner accesses and manages reliable information effectively and responsibly.

   The learner:

• develops an effective search strategy.
• uses technology to access and manage information.
• uses selection criteria to choose appropriate information
• uses information responsibly.

As part of your First Year Experience course (FYEX 1000), you will be introduced to the library and to college-level research. The resources in this guide are designed to assist you with the Information Literacy assignment, an Annotated Bibliography, worth 25% of your grade in the class!

For this assignment you will create an annotated bibliography that will represent a selection of sources gathered on a selected topic. You will provide database-generated citations for two articles in MLA or APA style followed by a short analysis (your annotation) of each source's contents. Your sources must be one academic journal article and one popular article from a magazine or newspaper.

This assignment requires that you use the following criteria to evaluate your selected sources. These must be included in the annotations:

Relevance  — Answer each of the following questions to determine the relevance of the source to your topic:

o   Explain what information the source adds to your understanding of the topic.

o   What type of source did you select, i.e. academic article, magazine article, trade article, or newspaper article?

o   Does the source you found give you the “big picture” on your topic or does it deal with a more focused aspect of it?  Explain using details from the article.

Currency — Answer each of the following questions to determine how current the source is regarding your topic and whether or not you need more up-to-date information on it.

o   Considering your topic, explain how the date of publication might impact the value of the information in the source.

o   When was the article published? Would that date of publication be current enough to provide up-to-date information?

o   If the article is older, what information in it might still be useful to your research?  What points in it would you need to  find additional, more up-to-date information on to get a better idea of your topic in the present day?

Additionally, this assignment will introduce you to one of the many resources available through the library. For this assignment, you must use FiSH (First, Search Here) to locate the two required articles. To search FiSH, click on the About the Library tab at the top of this page. For more help, refer to the Video Tutorials tab. 

Below you will find a copy of the information literacy assignment, an example of a completed annotated bibliography, and a handout with information about the assignment and a variety of library resources. Read these carefully, and use the example for additional help.