Featured - Information Matters

Health information no longer moves in a neat, straight line from the researcher’s bench to the clinician’s desk to the patient. Today, it ricochets. It travels through search engine auto-completes, TikTok feeds, private WhatsApp groups, and AI-generated summaries long before a patient ever sits down with a doctor or a medical librarian. For cancer patients and survivors exploring Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), this networked reality creates both real possibility and serious risk. In digital spaces, the challenge isn’t just finding information. It is untangling how certain health claims become highly visible, endlessly repeated, and ultimately trusted.

Featured Opinion

May 22, 2026 Elaine Kong

Beyond “Check the Source”: Information Literacy for Health Decisions in the Age of AI

For decades, the golden rule of information literacy was simple: check the source. Who wrote the article? When was it published? Does the URL end in .gov or .edu? Those questions still matter, but in today’s digital ecosystem, they are no longer enough. Modern users don’t just read static webpages; they navigate a chaotic blend of search engine snippets, algorithmic social feeds, influencer testimonials, and AI-generated summaries. In high-stakes arenas like personal health, evaluating a single “source” is no longer the primary task. The real challenge is making sense of an entire information environment.

Featured Original

May 22, 2026 Andrew Walsh

Neurodiverse Perceptions of Information Literacy

In many academic and professional settings, IL is treated as something people either possess or lack. Once someone is qualified or trained, they are often assumed to be information literate by default. In contrast, we believe that becoming information literate in the workplace is a continuous, effortful, and highly contextual process, particularly for neurodivergent people, for example, for autistic librarians in the workplace.

Featured Original

March 16, 2026 Janice Roman-Tamesis

Information Privilege and the Politics of Translating “Depression”

Information privilege helps us see how access and visibility shape what becomes credible, legitimate, and shareable knowledge. It refers not only to unequal access to information, often structured by institutional affiliation, education, class, or social position, but also to unequal access to the means of making experience intelligible. In scholarly communication, this usually appears through paywalls, subscriptions, databases, and prestige economies. Yet information privilege also operates through language. As discussions from the Association of College & Research Libraries have suggested, access to information is inseparable from access to the systems that authorize what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Featured Original

March 16, 2026 Lynne Bowker

Breaking Down Language Barriers to Reduce Information Privilege in Scholarly Communication

For decades, English has been a lingua franca in the research community, where it has become the principal language for publishing and conferences. But when one main language is used to share information, knowledge of this language is also needed to access information. In this way, English has become linked to information privilege: people who have mastered English can access scholarly information more easily than people who are less comfortable in this language. This has ripple effects, influencing the extent to which scientists can participate fully in scholarly communication. While the problems are clear, the solutions are trickier.

Featured Original

March 16, 2026 Tami Oliphant

From Access to Epistemology: Rethinking Information Privilege

The systems, tools, and practices developed by Big Tech and academic publishers that we use daily in our personal and professional lives have created inequitable and unjust information environments and societies. This is due to the concentrated power, extreme wealth, and influence in the hands of the few.

Featured Original

March 16, 2026 Lance Masilungan

Transgender Information Sharing: Reject Tradition, Trust Each Other

“Transgender” is no longer a foreign word in the Philippines, nor are transgender Filipinos allowing discrimination to hold them back. Though LGBTQIA+ minority groups in the Philippines are still seen as “deviant, immoral, or even illegal” by the wider population, transgender Filipinos do not let that stop them from thriving. Instead of relying on traditional sources of information and risking intolerance from Filipino society, they create, recreate, and distribute information they’ve made themselves for both education and community solidarity.

Featured Original

March 16, 2026 Simon Philip Sacramento

The Vantage Point: Reflections on Information Privilege as a Physician-Librarian

As a librarian (occasionally practicing) and a practicing physician, I often encounter workplace issues that would be better resolved with a little perspective from the information field. Problems, such as the need to search for reliable information in order to treat a particularly challenging medical case, are commonplace. This can be a frustrating but fascinating experience, as I, being an information professional, have some intrinsic knowledge of the issues that make solving these problems a challenge.

Education Featured

March 16, 2026 Sakeena Alikhan

Who Is Research For? Rethinking Information Privilege

Have you ever shared your personal story with someone—only to never hear what happened to it afterward? This happens more often than we realize in academic research. Communities open their homes, share their experiences, and give researchers hours of interviews and photographs. Later, the research appears in journals, conferences, and university libraries. But the people whose lives shaped that research may never see the final results. Why? Because academic knowledge often circulates within privileged spaces—behind paywalls, in English, and through technical language.

Education Featured

March 13, 2026 Lynne Bowker

Localizing OER to Counter Information Privilege

The rising cost of textbooks can lead university students to make tough decisions, such as buying a cheaper, outdated version, sharing a single copy among a group, making an illegal copy, or going without a textbook altogether. Each of these coping strategies can negatively impact a student’s learning. Thankfully, open educational resources (OER) are emerging as a means of combatting information privilege that is linked to finances. This is a positive step forward, but is it enough? How else can we leverage the potential of OER to reduce other types of information privilege?