We are living through a difficult age for intellectual freedom and information literacy – not quite unprecedented, but challenging established American values that some of us may have forgotten or deliberately abandoned. Between the onslaught of misinformation on social media to the targeted manipulation and censorship by politicians, the information policies and practices of local institutions may be our only defense. But should it be up to librarians to provide the last defenses of our shared information ecosystem? We may be eager to take up the challenge, but it is not without a cost. 

For my Core Values project, I explored how information literacy instruction and policy within libraries could keep up with misinformation on social media. The poster component of the project forced me to focus on the key highlights of my research. Information policies and cultural forces have weakened the information literacy of our society and given librarians an impossible task, and this project gave me the opportunity to explore the impact of those policies.