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A key part of media and information literacy is understanding how content providers including the media construct different types of stories, how they shape content in presenting it, and what techniques they use to organize material that otherwise would be chaotic and difficult to understand.

All content providers – ranging from libraries through to YouTube - curate their content holdings in terms of what they include and exclude, and how they present and organize access to different components rather than others.

lt is important to have a basic understanding of the different techniques employed by the different content providers, including the media. Pay attention to the 'codes' they use and how to interpret them. It may also be relevant to consider who is producing and arranging the material and how active or interactive the consumers of media and information are – whether their own perceptions impact upon the way information is presented.

Regarding any types of content, it is vital to identify the verified truth. This is in academic, scientific, offcial (government) and cultural texts published, printed, or streamed online either electronically or on paper. This means being able to scan texts, identify the date of publishing and geographical coverage, potential bias, errors or in other words deciding if the content is valid or not. Users need to interact with institutions that acquire, organize and lend/share/distribute information materials. An example would be different types of libraries: school (from kindergarten to high school), public (they can either be county, state and even federal libraries open to the general public usually free of charge), academic (university, research centres and other higher education institutions), special (business, governments, NGOs, etc.), and national (all national publications published at home or abroad preserved for posterity). The range of sub- institutional types is even wider in regard to media and Internet companies.

Closely curated content can be found in libraries but also in museum collections, where each piece can be a source of data or information. Similarly, archives are excellent sources of primary information. Open access repositories offer a myriad of journals, books and primary sources, such as Directory of Open Access Journals (). DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is funded from donations, 18% of which comes from sponsors and 82% from members and publishing members. Other examples include , which gives visibility to the scientific productions of higher education institutions and research centres from Latin America, promoting open access and free full-text information. The Internet also carries a vast range of information available to potential readers or users, provided by universities, institutes, museums and other institutes, as well as by individuals, and often curated with different and much looser quality criteria than libraries.

• How do producers of content use different techniques or ways of representing different kinds of information?
• How are these uses identified and accepted by the general public?
• What are the codes and conventions or the ‘key ingredients’ or grammar of a particular provider?
• A media commentator, Marshall McLuhan, wrote that ‘the medium is the message’33, meaning that the medium itself - print, broadcast, lnternet - affects the way we understand the world. How does the choice of technology influence the kind of information we receive? How does this shape the message conveyed if at all?

• Examine images as one form of representations
• Analyse alphabetic text
• Analyse the context
• Who benefits from the acceptance of representations and who loses? How do these images influence the way we see ourselves and others?
• How do they influence our knowledge and understanding of the world beyond our immediate experience?
• How do they influence our view of gender equality, women's empowerment, gender groups, persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and ethnic minority groups?
• Examine to what extent the editorial independence is reflected in media text.

• Notions of human agency or autonomy are important here – who is creating the text and why? What are the institutional and individual interests at stake?
• How this connects to rights of communication and expression for the citizen and the professional
• How it connects to freedom of expression, active citizenship and media and information literacy
• Resources (human, financial, technological, etc.) and regulations are considered here.

• Target and active audiences
• Active citizens and users/consumers negotiate their own meanings based on what they bring to a text
• Audiences have expectations of content providers based on utility, transparency, accountability and fairness which underpin the brand of the provider and trustworthiness.
• Users/consumers have personal, economic, social and cultural needs for information.

• How do content providers select and curate resources and major selection criteria?
• How do content providers such as libraries subscribe or purchase information resources such as books, periodicals and databases? With their limited budget what do they prioritize and why?
• How to engage with government entities that provide information?

33. McLuhan & Fiore 1967. The Medium is the Message: An lnventory of Effects. Penguin Modern Classics

• How are content providers funded? See Modules 10 and 13
• How do content providers generate income from their services? See Module 10
• Requesting information about yourself stored by digital communications companies, including social media. See Module 8.

• What is the purpose of this text? How is this produced?
• Who created it?
• Who is the intended audience? How do you know? What is the main message?
• Who benefits and what do they gain? What are my information needs?
• How can l identify and define this need?
• Does the information I need exist in the form I need it? If not, what action can I take? How to understand, organize and assess the information found?
• How can I present this information in usable formats?
• How can I preserve, store and reuse, record and archive information?
• How can or should I share this content?

• Select a visual or other text of your choice and apply the key questions listed above. What can you learn about the institutions, the messages conveyed, as well as the intended audience?
• Think about a personal or economic activity that you would like to undertake. Write this down. Apply the key questions above starting with, ‘what are your information needs?’
• Write down all the activities you do during a day, from the moment you wake up in the morning until you go back to bed at night. Analyse in small groups: do you need information to participate in these activities? Write down next to each activity the information you need. For example, you need to know the temperature outside in order to get dressed; you need to know the traffc situation before you take the bus; you need to know about the economy in order to know if you are going to ask for a loan. Discuss: how important is information in your daily life? How many decisions would you have diffculty making without information?
• Using the library or the Internet, research some of the top television or radio programmes, films or advertisements from the past year. What key topics from the list above were central to their success? Describe the ways in which one or more of the above topics are highlighted by this example(s).
• Write down a paragraph about the importance of citations, references and bibliographies in books and journal articles. Scientists and learners must cite and provide information about the information sources they used. Journalists do the same but depending on certain sources (could be a person or classified documents) and how sensitive some information might be, they have to do so differently to protect their sources for the public's interest and respect international journalistic standards on ethics and professional journalistic practices. In so doing, journalists are required to verify their facts and sources ().
• Further explain why journalists should have the right not to disclose the sources of their information, other than to their editors. Guide discussion around the pros and cons of this reality.
• Discuss 'Journalism is a discipline of verification' - meaning the techniques journalists use to check facts and authenticate sources
• OpenDOAR: Identifying Relevant Repositories. Search in libraries or on the Internet the website of the open repositories website OpenDOAR, and locate repositories that are in your language. List 10 repositories in your language and five that are relevant to you in other languages. Write down a paragraph about which are the objective this directory may have and why it was created and how it can benefit you and your community.