Many instruction librarians teach students that the URL extension .gov is one sign of a reliable, authoritative Internet source. This is true in many cases, but there are other very important reasons that government information deserves a larger place in information literacy sessions. It offers a clear example of several concepts students must understand in order to judge the reliability of the information they find. Information from different administrations and different branches of government can be potent examples of how point of view, bias, and audience affect the content, structure, and tone of information sources. Furthermore, government sources can be used to evaluate secondary sources that cite them or analyze them.

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During the last few years, many academic libraries have accepted the challenge of helping their users locate and acquire the numeric data they need. To meet their users' ever-increasing need for data, librarians are purchasing data sets one at a time ("small data"). This service, though important to our users, raises many issues in the areas of collection scope, acquisition procedures, and discovery and access. The authors conducted a survey of data librarians in summer 2015 and followed up by interviewing five data librarians in depth to report on how academic libraries collect and manage small data and to explore the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches.

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