Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu

The News Literacy Project. Access: https://newslit.org.

The Internet and social media apps are alive with trolls, hackers, “fake news,” hoaxes, rumors, and suspect posts and personas. The News Literacy Project (NLP) provides a teaching resource to help students skillfully navigate this uncertain digital world.

NLP is a national education nonprofit that reinforces the efforts of librarians to teach students to actively evaluate online information. NLP offers both free and subscription services.

The site renders a clean, responsive interface with a visually appealing and engaging homepage. A sitewide menu affords access to internal pages, and a background graphic leads to an article update about NLP or a current news literacy topic. Further down the homepage, informative “cards” take the visitor inside the site to the “Get Smart About News” page. The cards highlight shareable news literacy tips (#NewsLitTip) and facts (#DidYouKnow) or link to a quick news literacy quiz or informative stories on dubious sources.

Visit the “For Educators” page to sign up for the weekly email newsletter, “The Sift,” which shares examples of misinformation found online for the preceding week. The examples alternate between memes, social media posts, websites, and other online formats. Classroom activities and suggested discussion questions are often presented along with the examples. “For Educators” also puts forward upcoming educator trainings, a blog on civic engagement instruction, and details on “Checkology,” a subscription-based virtual news literacy classroom. Three of the foundational “Checkology” lessons are available to use without subscribing. “Checkology” is now partnering with libraries for user access and professional development activities.

Lastly, download the 2019 PDF “Give Facts a Fighting Chance: the Global Playbook for Teaching News Literacy.” The Resources section alone is enough to keep one busy discovering new tools for information literacy instruction.

Librarians and professors across the curriculum will find this site, along with “The Sift” newsletter and civics blog, a boon for staying abreast of current questionable online information and how best to incorporate this information into information literacy lessons. Although the emphasis is on news literacy, the tools and techniques shared on the site help students practice and develop essential online information-seeking behaviors and skills.

Keep an eye on this site. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation recently awarded the group a $5 million dollar grant to support and expand news literacy education.—Vivian Linderman, Long Beach City College, vlinderman@lbcc.edu

Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry. Access: https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/.

The Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) is a think tank that is grounded in public policy research with a goal of informing policy decisions in Japan. As an incorporated administrative agency, RIETI is an independent agency of the Japanese government, which provides research in support of investigating new approaches to economic and industrial policy. Headquartered in Tokyo, the organization’s website is a portal to research conducted by its team of fellows.

RIETI’s site features research papers and shorter articles authored by fellows who are primarily based at Japanese universities with topics ranging from industrial innovation and management to investment and trade. Partnerships and collaborative projects with a variety of organizations, including the International Monetary Fund and the UK-based Centre for Economic Policy Research, bring more international perspective to the website’s large selection of papers and commentary.

The interface may be set to Japanese, English, or Chinese. While some publications are available in both Japanese and English, it appears that many are available in one language only. A more limited selection of papers are available in Chinese. The site provides no information about decisions relating to which publications are available in translation or a timeline for availability of translated versions. Additional publication—books and series—have publication information and tables of contents only.

In addition to research papers and articles, RIETI’s website provides access to datasets relating to Japanese and Chinese industrial productivity, trade, foreign exchange, foreign direct investment, and aging and retirement in Japan. These are not searchable databases, but datasets available as downloadable Excel files.

Navigation aids include dropdown menus, new content browsing by publication category, and a basic Google site search. A more targeted search is available specifically for discussion papers with title, author, keyword search options, and date and language filtering. Using the dropdown menus for searching the site requires some deciphering of the categories given to various content.

With its highly specialized focus, RIETI’s site is a good recommendation for graduate students studying international trade and economic policy of Japan and the Asian region. Students and faculty who are looking for perspective from the region and academic content in Japanese will find this site of value.—Ann Flower, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, aflower@miis.edu

The Shelley-Godwin Archive. Access: http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/.

The purpose of The Shelley-Godwin Archive is to bring together in digital form the primary manuscripts of works by four authors: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The project is the result of a collaboration between the New York Public Library, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Oxford’s Bodleian Library, with additional contributions from several other notable libraries and museums.

Though its short-term goal is to provide access to the original drafts and manuscripts of these writers’ works under open licenses, the long-term goal is to create a digital commons, where many shareholders, including academics and the general public, can contribute scholarship. Originally funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, at present the archive houses 12 works by “England’s First Family of Writers”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams and his philosophical work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice; and several works by Percy Shelley, including poems and a translation of Plato’s Ion. As yet, no works by Mary Wollstonecraft have been included.

The site boasts a robust search feature, as well as clear documentation on how to best navigate the archive, and useful information on the digitization and metadata standards and tools used in the project. The included writings may be organized as either a work or a manuscript. Organized as a work, the writing is presented in logical, linear sequence, as it would be in publication. Organized as a manuscript, the writing is presented in the order in which it was originally handwritten by the author—potentially useful for scholarly study, though not necessarily in sequence. For most works, a digital copy of the original page is presented next to a transcript. Several versions of the transcript can be viewed: a version in which line edits, additions, and changes are preserved from the original; a reading copy, which incorporates the aforementioned changes into a “final version”; and an XML Markup version. A landing page for each work includes historical context for that work.

Though it only contains 12 works at present, the future potential of this project is considerable, and its goals and adherence to open access are admirable. Scholars are encouraged to check it out.—Patrick Wohlmut, Linfield College, pwohlmut@linfield.edu