The Importance of Information Literacy

           Information literacy is an extremely important concept to grasp, especially for those people who are in college.  Being able to sift through the millions upon millions of pieces of information that are available is an extremely vital part of being successful in college.  The technology options that our society is able to use have changed the amount of information that can be accessed and the ways that it can be sorted through.

            In the early stages of organizing information, the sources that were stored in a library were listed on cards.  A person would have to search though thousands of cards to find the sources that related to their topic.  Also, if they were searching for multiple topics then they would have to search through a different set of cards and compare their results with their previous search and see if there are any sources that encompass both ideas.  With the advancements of technology, the information that was previously on these cards is stored on a database on the computer and searches can be done to do the work that took many minutes and condensed it to a few seconds.  This is one of the major milestone steps that libraries around the world have taken to simplify the previously taxing process.

            The amount of information that people were able to access previously was very limited because of the resources that they had.  In today’s world, information from across the world is and the fingertips of millions of people through databases.  A database is a compilation of works that include newspapers, magazines, journals, scholarly works, books, and many others.  They even include audio sources that include interviews from important people and other things.  With all of this information so easily accessible the world has become a much more educated place.

            The world we live in is changing exponentially every day.  The information that we have access to is limitless and that is why information literacy is extremely important.  The databases that Siena College has chosen for its students to use are one of the ways that we can be sure that they are using secure sources.  If a student decides to go off the path to education that Siena College has set for them, they might be having problems in their future when it comes to the legitimacy of their information in their papers.