I Was Teaching Citations All Wrong

I used to teach citations all wrong. Well…yes and no. It’s about bibliographic citations and it’s also not just about bibliographic citations. It’s what I’ve learned in the 20 years of being a librarian, the ways I was naïve or just green in my career. I hadn’t realized the entirety of the digital information world that was unfolding. I knew some parts of it, but couldn’t see the whole picture as I can now and I certainly didn’t see where I was part of the problem. So, what am I talking about? Let’s start at the beginning.

I spent early years of my career at a high school. Back then I was doing all I could to steer students away from Yahoo answers and towards credible resources. I cringed when I heard teachers say, ““Just Google it,” and it became my mission to teach the students AND the teachers about the wonders of the library databases. I showed all of them how easy it was to use the pre-made citations from the various collections for their assignments. “Just copy and paste!” I said. Several years later, when I was at a community college, I had started perfecting my slide presentations with catchy phrases and images to highlight the benefits of using databases. I argued that using the database was easier than searching online. You could trust content and, once again, I expressly pointed out that citations were already done for the user. Why should anyone waste time having to hunt for bibliographic information when the databases had it all ready. “This is the only time l advocate to copy and paste. Just remember to change the font!” I thought I was being clever and memorable. Now I realize I was part of the problem.

I always knew libraries were better than the Internet, but it was a tough sell. Technology was evolving rapidly and school and libraries were suffering cuts left and right. Still, I knew the importance of teaching information literacy. I just didn’t know that I was going about it completely wrong. I thought I was competing with the Internet. I tried to show how using the library services was better and easier by advocating to offload thinking. “Just copy and paste the citation that you need,” is haunting me now. I was actually telling students it was easier to hand off thinking about one small piece. What I know now is that as small as it was, it’s not insignificant.

Layered into my approach were all sort of assumptions about what they had and had not learned before me and I was also blinded by the desperation to work any angle possible with the little time I had. I didn’t think about how the basic understanding of building a bibliographic citation had been something I learned in elementary school from my librarian. My ability to look for the author, title, publisher, place of publication and date of publication was ingrained and automatic. These five pieces of information are the building blocks of information literacy. I missed the opportunity to reinforce that very basic practice with the students and it’s a regret I have to this daybecause I see how I was part of the problem we face in our society.

Asking for or considering who made it, what it is, who paid for it, how it got made and when it was made are the fundamentals of evaluating information to determine why it should or should not be used further. Many people have probably stopped thinking about it outside of academics. Some might still need to apply it for their profession, but perhaps it’s only limited to their field. We never really had to concern ourselves much with it before the Internet, because credentialed information professionals – librarians and journalists - did the work for us. They did the leg work of vetting resources. Search engines went around the information gatekeepers and social media blurred the lines between who was spreading what news and where it was coming from. We didn’t stop asking who, what, where, when and how when Aunt Betty shared a statistic about the price of milk. We didn’t stop because we had never done it in the first place.

I thought it was okay to tell students to stop thinking about the bibliographic details, but I have learned I should have been reinforcing the importance of them at every step of the way. Information literacy is not complex. It’s not always easy, but it’s not complex. All you have to do is remember that everything has a trade-off. The trade off for stripping away libraries and librarians, bankrupting newspapers and living with a social media feed where the lines between information and cat memes is nonexistent is you have to do the thinking yourself. All of it.

I wasn’t wrong about all of the things I was trying to teach the students before, but there is one big change in my approach these days. I don’t try to compete with the Internet because there is no competing with the Internet and there never was. Humans are always going to be better. It’s not even close. And when we put humanity first, we will all win.