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Library Resources for W290: Thinking About Information

This guide is designed to help you identify and evaluate information sources.

Popular vs. Scholarly Sources

ACTIVITY TIME

Things to Consider When Thinking About Information

These are the basic steps you'll take when gathering information sources you're considering using in your research:

1. Define your information need and the amount of information needed. (For example, are you writing a research paper or an opinion piece for your blog?)

2. Identify the type of information contained in a source and the purpose of that information. (i.e. is there any bias? Is this written for a particular audience? General readers; experts? What type of information is it - scholarly, popular, does it have data, does it have methods?)

3. Identify the value of resources in a variety of formats. (This is the most important thing to remember. Your job, as an information consumer, is to integrate all different types of information to both support your hypothesis and make new observations).