Reflecting on SCIL’s Inaugural Year | |
As the Simmons Center for Information Literacy wraps up its inaugural year, we are excited to take a moment to reflect back on the Center’s activities, projects, and partnerships. In this newsletter, we highlight faculty, students, and staff who received SCIL mini grants, brief recaps of a few SCIL events, an exciting student-led project, and a resource that can be used and shared. We are so grateful for everyone who supported SCIL throughout this past year, and we look forward to continuing to find ways to empower people with the skills to locate and access trustworthy information, strengthen civic participation, and support an informed and engaged society. If you have any questions or would like to connect, please feel free to reach out at scil@simmons.edu.
- Laura Saunders, SCIL Director
| | The Simmons Center for Information Literacy offered funding for Simmons University students, faculty, and staff to support professional development, projects, and research aligned with the mission and goals of the Center. Below we highlight two of the many wonderful mini grant projects. | | AI and Information Literacy: Research Reimagined | |
Dr. JoJo Jacobson
Assistant Dean of Academic Support & Special Projects
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Kayla Pringle '26
B.S. Computer Science, MLIS
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For 12 weeks over the course of this past fall semester, Simmons students, faculty, and staff have convened for a weekly workshop series led by Kayla Pringle and Dr. JoJo Jacobson to discuss AI tools, the growing implications of AI use, and how to engage critically with AI. Pringle explained, "We aren't advocating for or against artificial intelligence, we are just trying to provide an opportunity for education."
Topics covered in a seminar format included navigating how to best use AI tools for educational support, detecting bias in generative AI tools, ethics of generative AI, including implications of the aforementioned biases. These sessions were led by a combination of guest speakers, faculty members, and a new addition to the Simmons community: Information Literacy Consultants. ILCs are graduate students in the Simmons School of Library and Information Science who were hired through an internal grant from SCIL to support the Tutoring Center by offering in-class instruction on information literacy for undergraduate general education courses, as well as 1:1 and group consultations for students.
Other sessions of the AI and Information Literacy Workshops took the form of “AI Research Tool Reviews,” during which participants were encouraged to bring computers and experiment with some of the most popular AI platforms in higher education today. Speakers’ expertise was balanced with ample room for audience questions and group discussions. Over 130 people registered for the workshops either online or in person, and a regular group of returning participants quickly developed into a small learning community.
Members of the Simmons community interested in continuing the conversation can join this SCIL Discord server!
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Untangling Truths: A Community Conversation on Mis & DisInformation
Castel Green '28
MLIS/MA History-Archives Management
Inspired by an event hosted by the Boston Public Library “Unraveling the News,” Castel Green, graduate student in SLIS/History, Archives Management hosted a hands-on conversation about mis- and dis-information in collaboration with the Simmons Multicultural Center. This community-based discussion encouraged students to bring their own crafts or use provided art materials to keep hands moving while engaging in conversations about mis- and dis-information.
The first hour of the event included an optional beginner-friendly crochet lesson, while the second hour was a discussion about how to distinguish between fact and fabrication. Participants learned how to categorize different types of mis- and dis-information, shared anecdotes of experiences they had of being duped on the internet, and brainstormed techniques to combat the spread of misinformation. Green shared that the goal of this event was to cultivate an environment where students felt comfortable asking questions, and developing their media literacy skills: “[I want] people to walk away [...] feeling more confident in their media literacy and understanding of misinformation so that they can continue building on those skills in their everyday life.”
Creating a regular, casual space for conversation about misinformation is especially important today. Sharing resources, destigmatizing not-knowing, and encouraging transparent conversations opens pathways for students to explore their relationship to the content they consume regularly in ways that encourage critical thinking skills. Perhaps even more importantly, events like this one cultivate a sense of community and help participants feel that they are not alone in their uncertainties, and can rely on their peers to sit together to untangle the web of media they are faced with every day.
| | Academic Librarians' Responses to Mis/Disinformation: A Cross-Country Study | | |
Over the past two years, SCIL Director Dr. Laura Saunders has been co-leading with Joumana Boustany of Gustave Eiffel University in Paris an international research study of how academic librarians are addressing information literacy in response to mis/disinformation in their work. Findings from the research were presented at the European Council on Information Literacy (ECIL) conference in Bamberg, Germany in September. The cross-country study examined how academic librarians in 16 nations understand and respond to the challenges of mis- and disinformation, with a particular emphasis on their perceptions, teaching practices, and collaboration with faculty. The study was piloted in the United States and France and then replicated in countries across Europe and in Asia and South America using a structured online survey that included Likert-scale and categorical questions.
The findings reveal substantial cross-national differences in librarians’ concern about misinformation, perceptions of its impact on students, beliefs about instructional responsibility, and the extent to which they teach or assess related skills. Across all countries, respondents overwhelmingly agreed that information literacy is an essential tool for combatting mis/disinformation, with mean scores above 4.5 on a five-point scale. However, there was greater variation regarding whether instructors in higher education have a responsibility to teach information literacy, with countries like Norway, the UK, and Australia showing strong agreement while Romania and Estonia reported notably lower levels.
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While information literacy instruction is widely valued, gaps persist between that conviction and actual practice, particularly in assessment and integration of mis/disinformation pedagogy. The United States and France show the strongest engagement in instructional and collaborative practices, whereas countries such as Romania, Slovenia, and Brazil report low adoption.
Overall, the study concludes that institutional and cultural contexts strongly shape librarians’ approaches, underscoring the need for systemic, institution-level strategies rather than relying solely on individual librarians.
| | Information Literacy Advocacy Project | | Civic Engagement at the Boston Public Library | | |
A team of four graduate Simmons students formed a project team to support the Boston Public Library as it begins to implement its new strategic plan. The plan includes civic engagement as a central focus and BPL administrators were interested in engaging staff, community partners, and patrons in generating specific goals and objectives that would respond to community needs and interests.
Over the course of the semester, the students met with BPL administrators and ran focus groups with various BPL staff to learn more about how they define civic engagement and civic literacy, what work they are already doing in this area, and how they would like to move forward. They also met with community partners and library staff from other large, urban public libraries that are doing work in this area to better understand community needs and the potential role the BPL could play. They conducted a literature review, including white papers from the Urban Libraries Council on civic engagement projects. Finally, they did a selective review of current library programs across all 25 BPL branches to produce a catalog of current programming on civic engagement and civic literacy topics.
The students are currently in the process of developing a report on their activities that will include findings from the literature review, interviews and focus groups, a proposed definition of civic engagement and civic literacy to guide implementation of the strategic plan, and a set of recommendations for that implementation, including possible goals, programs, and further areas of research. The report will be presented to the BPL staff in January.
| | Information is Power: The First Amendment, Public Records, and the Press | |
| |  | This past October, SCIL hosted an interactive mini-conference that explored how participants can use their First Amendment rights and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to uncover the truth and hold power accountable. Justin Silverman, Attorney & Executive Director of The New England First Amendment Coalition (NEFAC), began the conference with an overview of First Amendment rights, sharing his experience as a former journalist with a focus on the importance of press freedom in fostering an informed society. Beryl Lipton, Journalist & Senior Investigative Researcher at Electronic Frontier Foundation followed with a session on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and shared the necessary steps and components of submitting a public records request. Greg Sullivan, Attorney & President of NEFAC, closed the mini conference with an interactive Q&A session that provided participants with an opportunity to learn more about the legal side of freedom of expression based on their own experiences or well-known public cases related to the First Amendment. The mini conference coincided with the United Nations Global Media and Information Literacy Week, an annual event to raise awareness and celebrate the progress achieved towards media and information literacy for all.
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SCIL Keynote with Mike Caulfield:
How AI Enhances Thinking, How It Hinders It, and How Education Can Respond
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Our keynote speaker for the fall semester was Mike Caulfield, digital information literacy expert, and co-author of Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about what to Believe Online. His work over the past decade focused on contextualizing artifacts, events, and claims has contributed to the development of search engines like Google, and he is recognized as the founder of the “digital gardening” movement.
Caulfield developed the SIFT method, which is now used in hundreds of universities and classroom settings as a tool to improve students’ information literacy. This handy acronym stands for:
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Stop
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Investigate the source
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Find better coverage
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Trace claims, quotes and media to the original content
While the SIFT method is highly effective to use in any information-seeking endeavor, Caulfield noticed that he had been getting questions about formulating a supplement to SIFT: a technique that addressed AI. Increased use of AI in classroom settings and daily life has turned Caulfield’s attention from digital information literacy in general to AI literacy specifically, with a particular eye toward the two-pronged question:
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How does one assess the accuracy of any information (images, text, video) encountered online in the age of AI?
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What does an effective use of AI tools look like?
Caulfield’s response to the request for a technique to discern and leverage artificial intelligence? “Get it in, track it down, follow it up.” Emphasizing evidence and the importance of simply beginning the search, this process prioritizes getting the “claim”, or any piece of information we want to verify, into an LLM and asking it to evaluate the claim. The first prompt you enter may not be perfect, but that’s ok! The next steps guide the user to continue to engage the system using “neutral questions”, or prompts that ask the system to provide additional information without leading it toward a particular answer. For instance, Caulfield shared a claim about the benefits of chocolate on memory and had participants practice neutral questioning by using this prompt:
Evaluate the evidence for the claim that _____ and provide a table that matches evidence to rebuttals and rates the strength of the evidence.
Once users have an overview of the evidence for and against a claim, they can continue to prompt the system with additional queries such as asking for the original sources of data and investigating whether research was industry funded. The more a user is able to practice crafting prompts, the more effective they become. Finally, Caulfield emphasized the importance of double-checking any information provided by an AI system, noting their tendency to hallucinate or provide made-up information, and the importance of reflecting on the answers, asking yourself what you find convincing and why.
| | SCIL Showcase: Celebrating Information Literacy | | |
Earlier this month, we celebrated SCIL's inaugural year by gathering members of the Simmons community and partners both online and in-person. The showcase featured more than a dozen lightning talks from faculty, students, and staff who received SCIL mini grants to conduct research, develop programming, and engage in professional development related to information literacy. After the presentations, there was an opportunity for participants to connect and discuss ideas to collaborate in fostering critical thinking and information literacy skills in the future.
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This segment of the newsletter contains a Creative Commons-licensed resource you are free to use and share.
Interested in learning more about instructional design principles for libraries and information centers? Access our "Instruction in Libraries and Information Centers" handout.
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