Advice From Michael Buckland

I asked Michael Buckland, professor emeritus, University of California–Berkeley, iSchool, for his perspectives on dealing with this issue.

“[The problem] is not simply the proliferation of information, but … that some of it is wrong and dangerous.” In looking at the increasingly flagrant dissemination of “fake news,” he asks, “What are the remedies? Somebody somewhere should be looking into possible legal curbs.”

More practically and closer to our expertise, Buckland says there are some basic points:

• Who is the source?
• Who is really the source, if disguised?
• What is the apparent credibility and track record of the source?
• What is the evidence (if any) behind the claims?
• What is the source of that evidence (if any)?

And so on.

While acknowledging that this is no more than basic good practice in fact checking, Buckland concludes, “Surely this is what libraries and the press are supposed to be designed for.”

 QUOTES

“The origin, rise and development of library schools in America mark what in the future will be deemed an important epoch in the history of bibliography….The object of such schools is to fit students for the delicate task of extracting from the volumes under their care the greatest amount of information and pleasure in behalf of the public and of lending accurate aid to students and researchers who otherwise would often be at sea in their investigations.”

– Corinne Stocker Horton 
“Library Schools: The New Profession for Men and Women” 
The New York Times, April 16, 1898 (p. 263)

 

“The university of the future is an educational speculation … the advance toward the university of the future is to be made, not by reforming existing systems, but by obtaining a free field for tentative educational progress in the case of the new classes that are being attracted to higher education.”

– Professor R. G. Moulton
University of Cambridge Extension, England 
The New York Times, Dec. 16, 1890 (p. 6)

 

“It is a remarkable fact that each year most of us read more words by a reporter such as Homer Bigart of The New York Times than we do of Plato, and yet today 2500 years after Plato wrote there is more critical work published on Plato every year than there is on Bigart. In fact, there is nothing published on Bigart, here used as an archetypal reporter, yet what he writes provides the critical diet for a major segment of the national ‘elite’ community.”

– James W. Carey 
“Journalism and Criticism: The Case of an Undeveloped Profession” 
The Review of Politics 36 (2), April 1974 (pp. 227–249)