The Ginger (Law) Librarian

At the Ohio Regional Association of Law Libraries (ORALL) Annual Meeting, as I presented on the  duty of technology competence in the algorithmic society , an astute law librarian asked (paraphrasing), "how does fake news play into this?" That question gave rise to a flurry of brain activity, as I considered how Google, for example, ranks relevancy, the rise of fake news, and the ability of users to spot fake news sources -- particularly for legal research. As I was presenting to a group of lawyers at a CLE this week, I polled them asking about the electronic resource that they primarily use for legal research. The overwhelming response was Google. Google uses a trademarked, proprietary – mostly secret – algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each webpage a relevancy score based on factors, such as: The frequency and location of keywords within the webpage. If the keyword only appears once within the body of the page, it will receive a low score for that key...

We know that law librarians lack status in the status-obsessed legal academy . Some could argue that this is a gender equity problem , with females making up the overwhelming majority of law librarians (another post for another time). But the lack of status also confers a lack of academic freedom to engage in tough conversations. This is particularly difficult for law librarians because we are not protected to fully engage with and advance our field . A field that is wrongly pegged as supplementary or secondary . In the era of big-data algorithms with no accountability and the "fake news" phenomenon, librarians must tackle tough, controversial subjects that affect information. And law librarians take the ethical use of information very seriously with the   ACRL Framework for Information Literacy emphasizing the role of “using information, data, and scholarship ethically” and the AALL Legal Research Competencies and Standards stating that a successful legal resea...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a new study out of Stanford that shows that preteens and teens are clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of "news." Some 82% of middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college.  The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source. More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing sit...