Community of Online Research Assignments

Missing Information Has Value: Climate Change and the EPA website

Environmental science students critically analyzed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website and its treatment of climate change during the Trump, Obama, and Bush presidencies. This library “warm-up” activity was designed to raise awareness of data fragility and the long-term accessibility of government websites. As future science professionals, it’s important to think about how this impacts scientists and their work. Students were introduced to several tools including: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, End of Term Archive, and Data Refuge.

Access, Power, & Privilege

This activity is designed to support teaching at the intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. The choose-your-own scenario activity, designed in LibWizard, can be used in a flipped classroom setting or in a traditional classroom. The choose-your-own scenario activity is inspired by and adapts questions from: Hare, S. & Evanson, C. (2018). Information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. College and Research Libraries.

Why You Won’t Have JSTOR When You Graduate and What You Can Do About It

These materials support a workshop for seniors on losing access to information after graduation. After a short lecture on why information costs money, we used each exercise, which focus on students making their work open, to encourage students to think critically about how their information sharing decisions impact others. We used three types of exercises--academic, creative, and work/corporate--to acknowledge that students are creators of multiple kinds of information.