What is Information Literacy and why is it important to me?

Information Literacy, or Information Competency, briefly defined, is the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information to become independent life-long learners. We now live in what is often referred to as the Information Age, a time when there is a wealth of information available to us at every turn. As a consequence, we have found ourselves in a world where information literacy is a set of skills crucial to being an informed, independent critical thinker.

Given the extraordinary amount of digital information and print documents published world-wide each year, coupled with the quantity and complexity of scientific, business and academic research along with the continued and rapid development of information and telecommunication technologies, it is evident that every student who has attended college and expects to get a job in any profession must have acquired basic information literacy skills.

No student should graduate from Hostos Community College without the ability to formulate a research question or problem, to determine its information requirements, to locate and retrieve the relevant information, to organize, analyze, evaluate, treat critically and synthesize the information and to communicate and present that information in a cohesive and logical fashion. Moreover, no student should graduate from Hostos without understanding the ethical, legal and socio-political issues surrounding information and knowledge and how it is produced. Students attending college in the South Bronx must be afforded an equal opportunity to acquire these skills if they are to participate as equal members of society in the 21st century.