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Learning how to identify and avoid inaccurate information, especially disinformation, is essential for any informational consumer. Many information literacy tools specify criteria that can help users evaluate information more efficiently and effectively. However, the authors of these tools do not always agree on which criteria should be emphasized, what they mean or why they should be included in the tool. This study aims to clarify two such criteria (source credibility and soundness of content), which evolutionary cognitive psychology research emphasize. This paper uses them as a basis for building a question-based evaluation tool and draws implications for information literacy programs.

This paper draws on cross-disciplinary scholarship (in library and information science, evolutionary cognitive psychology and rhetoric studies) to explore 15 approaches to information evaluation which conceptualizes source credibility and content soundness, two markers of information accuracy. This paper clarifies these two concepts, builds two sets of questions meant to elicit empirical indicators of information accuracy and deploys them against a recent piece of journalism which embeds a conspiracy theory about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper shows how the two standards can help us determine that the article is misleading. This paper draws implications for information literacy programs.

The meanings of and relationships between source credibility and content soundness often diverge across the 15 approaches to information evaluation this paper analyzed. Conceptual analysis allowed the authors to articulate source credibility in terms of authority and trustworthiness, and content soundness in terms of plausibility and evidential support. These conceptualizations allow the authors to formulate two respective sets of appropriate questions, the answers to which are meant to function as empirical indicators for the two standards. Deploying this instrument provides us with the opportunity to understand why a certain article discussing COVID-19 is misleading.

By articulating source credibility and content soundness as the two key criteria for evaluating information, together with guiding questions meant to elicit empirical indicators for them, this paper streamlines the process through which information users can judge the likelihood that a piece of information they encounter is accurate.

This paper explores informational dimensions of dancing by focusing on the cases of two folk dance groups practicing Mexican ballet folklórico in the US.

Thematic analysis of (1) extensive recollections from one of the study's coauthors, an academic librarian who was an active member of a ballet folklórico group; (2) an interview with that coauthor's brother, who is the current director of this school; and (3) instructional and demonstrative videos posted on YouTube by two US-based ballet folklórico groups.

Ballet folklórico dancers must use a wide range of information. The most important is sociocultural information, which expert dancers display while dancing and help novices acquire as enacted, expressed, or recorded information. According to expert dancers, sociocultural information becomes increasingly embodied through repeated enactment and constant interaction with ambient information. Specifically, ambient information provides parameters that both enable and limit the performance of the dance.

This paper contributes to the emergent Library and Information Science (LIS) literature on dancing and its informational aspects.

This study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.

Based on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.

Four themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.

There are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them.

Current and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic societies.

Within documentation studies, secret police files and document weaponization have been particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature.