Today’s “information revolution” is in many ways a new permutation of the revolution brought on by the “printing revolution” of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Martin Luther, for example, was a relatively obscure cleric who suddenly found himself addressing the world. This was not intentional on his part, but a new technology allowed his message to “go viral,” and he found himself at the forefront of a revolution. In a similar manner, today’s “digital revolution” has given voice to people who previously had no way to communicate with a wide audience, and has had tremendous social, political, and cultural implications. But it also has implications for students and their research. In this presentation, I would show how I use materials in the rare book collection at Drury’s F. W. Olin Library to teach students lessons on information literacy, and illustrate how I draw parallels between early information technology and that of today. The lessons for students are that we all have a tendency to assign tremendous authority to texts (sometimes even erroneous texts, and we must remember that the Internet is very text-intensive), and that images, whether they be today’s memes or a 16th century woodcut cartoon, sometimes communicate ideas more effectively than a text. Ultimately, I aim make students think about how they approach online texts and materials, and how they judge the validity of source material they find online and elsewhere.
