Be Credible : Information Literacy for Journalism, Public Relations, Advertising and Marketing Students

Abstract

This free and open textbook teaches college-level journalism students to become information experts. Using the themes of credibility and information literacy, the book helps today’s students, who start out all their research with Google and Wikipedia, to specialize in accessing, evaluating, and managing information that often is not accessible through Google searches. The book includes chapters on public records, freedom of information requests, nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, scholarly research, public data, interviews and more. Through current examples, instructional videos, suggested classroom activities, and practitioner insights, the authors challenge students to examine the credibility of the sources they use as current and future professional communicators. This project was funded by KU Libraries’ Parent’s Campaign with support from the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright and the Open Educational Resources Working Group in the University of Kansas Libraries.