Arsenals of Lifelong Information Literacy: Educating Users to Navigate Political and Current Events Information in World of Ever-Evolving Misinformation

The seemingly limitless amount of false information online, especially about important political and current events, has become an increasingly sizable problem for the health of democratic governance around the world, most especially in the realm of social media. Misinformation online now has significant tangible real-world impacts, with libraries being the best situated social institution to help prepare all users to identify misinformation and navigate through the online environments in which it lives. This article proposes the idea of lifelong information literacy-the teaching and reinforcing information literacy to all users at every opportunity. The constantly changing nature of misinformation online merits treating information literacy education as a continual process for all libraries. To maintain their long-cherished and hard-earned role as arsenals of democracy, libraries need to consider how to become arsenals of lifelong information literacy.