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Distrust in Institutions: Reference and Library Instruction During an Infodemic

Published: 09 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Librarians strive to educate patrons and curb the spread of disinformation by providing reference services, research consultations, and instruction in information literacy. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief deceptive information practices used to further political agendas. We focus on the dissemination of Covid-19 disinformation by the United States government, particularly the Trump White House where the federal pandemic response was centered. The consequences of Covid-19 disinformation produced at the federal level continue, such as Covid-19 denial, distrust in government institutions, distrust in science, and over 570,000 deaths in the U.S. so far. We identify different kinds of deceptive information practices deployed by the executive branch that contributed to an already fraught information ecosystem. We discuss how this affects academic librarians, students, and researchers who work with government information, as well as potential solutions found in information literacy and scholarly communication.

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  • (2024)A quantitative content analysis of topical characteristics of the online COVID-19 infodemic in the United States and JapanBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-024-19813-y24:1Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024

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dg.o '21: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
June 2021
600 pages
ISBN:9781450384926
DOI:10.1145/3463677
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Covid-19
  2. Disinformation
  3. Government Information
  4. Infodemic
  5. Information Literacy
  6. Librarianship
  7. Scholarly Communication

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DG.O'21

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Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 271 submissions, 55%

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  • (2024)A quantitative content analysis of topical characteristics of the online COVID-19 infodemic in the United States and JapanBMC Public Health10.1186/s12889-024-19813-y24:1Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024

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