Meet Destiny, who is several weeks into her first term of college. She has two weeks to write a short paper for her political science class, and the paper must reference five academic sources. She isn’t sure where to start, so she Googles “dictatorship.” Instantly, she has pages and pages of information at her fingertips. As the options fill her screen, Destiny’s confidence grows — she’s well on her way to getting this paper done! She copies paragraphs from the first five Web sites that show up in her search results and pastes them into her paper. Since she knows that copying someone else’s work is cheating, she rewrites the paragraphs in her own words. She includes references to the sites where she got her information, as well as a few images to jazz things up. She feels good when she hands the paper in, but later she receives the bad news: She got a D. Confused and upset about what happened, she asks herself: What did I do wrong?

To answer this question, Destiny needs to understand information literacy. Information literacy includes a number of elements, but we’ll focus on three of the most essential: finding information, evaluating its quality, and effectively communicating it to others (see Figure 10.1).

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Destiny had trouble with all three elements. First, she didn’t locate the type of information the assignment required (academic sources). Instead, she used the first sources that showed up in her Internet search, without considering whether they were appropriate for an academic paper. Second, she used the information without checking whether it was reliable. Third, the patchwork of paragraphs she stitched together from five different Web sites and then rephrased didn’t communicate a clear, smoothly flowing message.

Destiny wasn’t information literate, so she made some serious mistakes in her paper. But you don’t have to go down the same road. Let’s look closely at each element of information literacy, beginning with the first: where to find information.