Information literacy at university is the ability to effectively and ethically find, evaluate, create, build on, and responsibly communicate academic information. Digital information literacy is the ability to do all these using digital technologies and communication tools.
It is a core skill you need to develop so you can write assignments and dissertations as well as graduate with good employability skills. It involves extensive reading, from basic reading of what is on the screen to advanced critical reading of research material in different formats.
As a starting point, your lecturers have provided you with your initial reading in Library Reading Lists(opens in new tab) for every module. Your reading lists may contain resources in different formats. Please contact us if any of these resources are not available or accessible.
Books: Books are for learning general topics and theories. However, a book may be published five years ago and there may not be another edition. So, you have to use other sources as well to get the latest data on your subject areas.
Journals: Journals are subject specific academic magazines that contain latest academic articles by various authors. They are published frequently at regular intervals (quarterly, monthly, even weekly).
Databases: Databases are large collections of latest subject specific resources in different formats. They may contain, for example, case studies, company/industry/market research reports, audio and video files, statistics, photographs, and more...
Good quality websites: These are websites that are not there to sell products but give reliable information. They are for getting government reports and statistics, health data, corporate information, data from professional bodies, and more...
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Remember, reading improves your writing skills as well because you gain new information, learn new vocabulary, improve your use of punctuation marks, and discover complex sentence structures.