This study used content analysis to examine job postings from advertising agencies to find how often information literacy (IL) skills were seen in the job posts and how these skills manifest themselves. Five out of the six IL skills were seen in at least 41% of the job postings, however, the skill of synthesizing information was rarely mentioned. It was also found evaluating data and using data software is performed by advertisers. It concludes by asking librarians to introduce marketing students to more data, and calls on librarians to consider the context in which IL skills are used.

Digital-native news has become widely read and award-winning sources for news, and it is important to understand if news aggregator databases provide access to these emerging news outlets. This study compares four news aggregators’ coverage of popular and Pulitzer Prize finalists’ digital-native news organizations to print-native news outlets. It found only 14 out of 47 born-digital news organizations are available in the aggregators, and of those outlets, only four have a 100% date coverage.

The American news media is facing a crisis of public trust fueled, in part, by an epistemological disagreement of what constitutes quality news. Through a series of 50 interviews with journalism professionals and students, this research investigates how evidence-based journalism is created by gathering data on expert and novice research practices. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed through the lens of the ACRL Framework to provide the foundation for a journalism information literacy framework. This analysis can be used to inform library instruction and higher education journalism curricula and offers insights and greater transparency on the processes that underlie trustworthy news.

Journalists and librarians share a common goal of providing information to the public, yet very little is known about how journalists’ information seeking behavior intersects with libraries. This case study seeks to understand the information seeking behavior of environmental journalists by investigating how their information needs intersect with the library and how their information seeking behavior changed over the course of their 9-month fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven environmental journalists at the beginning and end of their fellowship, while an open coding approach was used to identify themes. Generally, study participants conducted research by (1) identifying a story idea and conducting a preliminary search, (2) expanding their knowledge on the topic through scientific articles and interviews with experts, (3) conducting field research, and (4) completing research when information is redundant and they are confident with their knowledge. This process, and their growing feelings of confidence as they conducted research, were similar to, but not exactly, Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process model. Their interactions with the library were mostly limited to accessing books and articles. Overall, there was little change in the participants’ information seeking behavior, possibly due to limited time to learn new resources, reliance on preexisting research habits, professional competence, and lack of awareness of library services (e.g. librarians, workshops, and public academic library access). An understanding of journalists’ information seeking behavior can help librarians conduct instruction and outreach efforts that address journalists’ information needs.

Increased computational and multimodal approaches to research over the past decades have enabled scholars and learners to forge creative avenues of inquiry, adopt new methodological approaches, and interrogate information in innovative ways. As such, academic libraries have begun to offer a suite of services to support these digitally inflected and data-intense research strategies. These supports, dubbed digital scholarship services in the library profession, break traditional disciplinary boundaries and highlight the methodological significance of research inquiry. Externally, however, these practices appear as domain-specific niches, e.g., digital history or digital humanities in humanities disciplines, e-science and e-research in STEM, and e-social science or computational social science in social science disciplines. The authors conducted a study examining the meaningfulness of the term digital scholarship within the local context at University of Colorado Boulder by investigating how the interpretation of digital scholarship varies according to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers. Nearly half of the definitions (46 percent) mentioned research process or methods as part of digital scholarship. Faculty and staff declined or were unable to define digital scholarship more often than graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Therefore, digital scholarship as a term is not meaningful to all researchers. We recommend that librarians inflect their practices with the understanding that researchers and library users’ perceptions of digital scholarship vary greatly across contexts.