Glossary: Information & Digital Literacy Glossary

Glossary

Information literacy
“The set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning.” ACRL
Information formats
Receipts, scholarly journals articles, and menus are all examples of information formats. Formats are recognizable types of information characterized by similarities in their physical and intellectual designs. For example, the physical characteristics of receipts are often similar
you can probably even imagine how a typical receipt from the store feels. Receipts also share intellectual characteristics: price, how much was paid, tax, and so on. Knowledge of format not only focuses on a surface-level visual evaluation of information, it importantly situates information by identifying its purpose and the processes it went through during creation and dissemination.
Organizing systems
An abstract characterization of how some collection of resources is described and arranged to enable human or computational agents to interact with the resources (Glushko, 2016). For example, a database, the internet, or a library catalog all are examples of organizing systems because they provide structure and access to the information they contain.
Value
This word can have many definitions. We primarily use two: 1) information as a commodity, and 2) information has the ability to enrich lives.
Digital literacy
  • (from ALA’s Digital Library Task Force): “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”
  • Digital Literacy: Understand, communicate, compute, create, and design in digital environments.
Research
(from William Badke): “research is the gathering of data to identify information that can answer a question, leading to a conclusion that will influence belief or action.” Gathering data looks different according to discipline.