Mind the gap! rom traditional and instrumental approaches of source evaluation towards source consciousness

Abstract

This article gives a critical review and investigation of traditional generic ways of teaching source evaluation and source criticism. Furthermore, it aims to investigate a new approach to address this area of information literacy instruction for teaching librarians. While traditional approaches focus on evaluating the source at hand, this study offers a perspective to supplement this with a more reflective perspective. The emphasises in this article is the need to focus on source consciousness though the newly developed model MIND (motivation – intention – need – debate). The goal is to supplement the traditional approaches of source evaluation where only the source is being assessed and no self-assessment is addressed. MIND also binds the searching process and source evaluation closer together and attempts to address the complexity of working with different sources. This approach does not attempt to replace former source evaluation processes, but rather to supplement them.