"Information Literacy in the Age of You-Tube" by M.J. Delia, Liaison Librarian, University of Guelph

This lively and well attended session focused on the provision of Information Literacy (IL) services to a generation of users for whom "Literacy" is no longer just textual or aural, but increasingly visual. Indeed, many of those presently dubbed "the You-Tube Generation" tend to gravitate more to visual formats such as video, animation and multimedia for their information needs. However, and as the speaker noted, users of these visual resources need as much help with evaluating these resources as they do with textual resources and often have difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is fictitious and understanding that there are many "manufactured moments" and "manipulated images" in the visual landscape which cannot be simply accepted as Gospel truth. To illustrate the point that what one sees is sometimes not the complete picture or whole truth, he used the example of the Los Angeles Times photographer who had blended (more like doctored) two pictures of British soldiers interacting with Iraqis to come up with a picture that he thought would appeal more to the readership of the LA Times. Some smart observers were able to see through this and he was subsequently fired for providing misleading pictorial information.

Mr. D'Elia argued that Librarians must move away from treating IL as being relevant in textual contexts only and instead embrace a view of IL that takes in all contexts, particularly the visual and the graphic, especially if they want to keep the You-Tube" crowd engaged. He concluded that the best way to help patrons navigate the challenges posed by visual content is to use the same standards used for enhancing information Literacy skills as set out in the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards, which teach patrons how to locate, critically evaluate and use information so that the information they retrieve and process is authentic, valid, and reliable. As should be expected, the presentation was full of visual clips and images.