If you're reading this blog, it's because blogs are a routine part of your professional growth. You view blogs as a valuable bedrock of the professional conversation. You may consider them to be at least as important as peer-reviewed publications, maybe even more so according to some observers. I'm actually not sure this is a fair comparison, since blogs may discuss research in the works but are not used as the publishing medium of choice for the final results. Blogs are also used to discuss matters that never make it into the journal or monographic literature, or even into magazine columns - and therefore their great value. In any case, you're among the critical mass of individuals who read blogs as an important part of your professional engagement.

This brings me to information literacy. Let me say right up front that I'm not an instruction librarian. Over the years I've taught in a variety of contexts - a graduate course, guest lectures, drop-in sessions - but I haven't made a systematic study of information literacy as practiced by librarians. I'm no expert. But I'm aware of general practices. And lately I've been wondering about information literacy as it relates to social scholarship.

I've blogged about social scholarship often enough, for example in Social Scholarship on the Rise, which proposes fourteen characteristics of a social scholar; and The Metrics of Social Scholarship. So I won't repeat this material here except to say this: there is a variety of practices, platforms, venues and metrics that make up scholarly discourse in the networked social world. These options, I believe, will become dominant in the next decade. The question is, how should information literacy approach these issues now?

Remember those Web pages about evaluating Web sites? This has been a staple of instruction, and I've done my part. Eleven years ago, I put together a brief advisory page with a colleague who is head of our instruction program here. I look at this now and wax nostalgic about the early days of the Web. This page has 1996 written all over it. I'm especially struck by the statement that Web sites are rarely refereed or reviewed, as are scholarly journals and books. And then there's admonition to look for evidence of bias.

This sounds to me so quaint. As social scholarship evolves, bias is all the rage. We're entering an era of what I like to think of as "authoritative bias."

In this context, bias consists of a number of things, including blog postings, comments, forum conversations, ratings, rankings, annotations, bookmarks, tags, etc. In the networked social world, this is combined with the metrics of use. How all this activity becomes authoritative is summarized by what Michael Jensen calls Authority 3.0. It's a fascinating concept, and it's something that has the potential to change the face of scholarly publishing.

Out of context, you could say that blog postings, comments, annotations, discussions, ratings, and so on are representative of bias and therefore have no part to play in scholarly discourse. But this notion is being turned on its head as scholars make use of networked social tools to expand the scholarly process. This expansion makes scholarship more open, participatory, conversational and democratic. In other words, I wouldn't want to see an updated page about evaluating Web resources that presents social tools as monolithically biased phenomena that offer nothing more than personal opinion that has no place in the scholarly endeavor. In fact, Authority 3.0 has the potential to become an integral part of scholarship. I'd like to see this acknowledged in information literacy training.

We can no longer be content to train students to understand the difference between peer-revewed journals and popular magazines, to appreciate the value of books, newspapers and reference sources, and to understand how to evaluate garden variety Web sites.

We're on the cusp of profound changes in the scholarly process. The evolving nature of publishing, scholarly conversation and peer review is rich fodder for our students. This makes the work of forward-thinking instruction librarians challenging, but not impossible. These librarians can, among other things:

• Make students aware of the emergence of social scholarship.
• Teach students about Authority 3.0 - or whatever you want to call it. Alert them to the expanding world of scholarly communication.
• In conjuction with this, abandon of the notion that there is a clear distinction between traditional peer-reviewed authority and authority derived from social scholarship. To put this another way, introduce the notion that there are emerging metrics of authority that can be derived from social scholarship.
• Use social tools (blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, etc.) as part of the research process in their courses.
• Assign readings from authoritative blogs in the research areas students are asked to explore.
• Practice social scholarship, and show these activities as examples of what's on the horizon.
• Incorporate this new material in tutorials on their library's Web site.

Authoritative bias is messy. It's not as clear-cut as peer review vs. popular publishing. Its metrics have yet to be figured out. But the neat little world of beware-of-bias is fast disappearing. Information literacy needs to acknowledge this, and train students to watch for the train coming around the bend.