Fantasy football and libraries: Upcoming publication

Here's the introduction to my upcoming article on information literacy and fantasy football for C&R Libraries News:

Librarians want students to effectively identify and evaluate information and make decisions based upon it. These are just some of the skills that an information literate student successfully applies. These are the same skills that over 19 million people use on a daily or weekly basis playing fantasy sports (Fantasy Sports Trade Association). As the NFL football season comes to a close, millions of Americans, as young as 12 years old, have spent the past few months connected to information literacy. They just don’t know it.
The challenge for librarians is to connect fantasy sports skills to information literacy and create building blocks for academic applications of the same concepts. One library, University of Dubuque, did just this by teaching fantasy football research to incoming student athletes. Through the lesson, students engaged in discussions of creditability, validity, timeliness, and search strategies to find and evaluate fantasy football information. The assessment of these instruction sessions showed incoming students successfully identifying evaluation criteria and reporting positive changes in how they viewed research and libraries.


image from C&R Libraries News