Source & Attribution: The six frames used throughout this resource are drawn directly from the
ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, published by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association. The framework is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The case study analyses and framing interpretations on this page are original educational commentary, not official ACRL content. Readers are encouraged to consult the
full framework document directly.
Authority is Constructed & Contextual
Authority — the right to be trusted — is not inherent. It is granted by communities for specific purposes, and can be misapplied, faked, or transferred to domains where it doesn't apply.
Information Creation as a Process
How information is made shapes what it can and cannot tell us. A tweet, a peer-reviewed paper, a poll, and a press release all produce different kinds of knowledge with different limitations.
Research as Inquiry
Good inquiry means actively seeking falsification, not just confirmation. The questions we ask determine which answers are possible. Framing a bad question produces a confident wrong answer.
Scholarship as Conversation
Knowledge is built through ongoing dialogue across time. Ignoring what came before doesn't make you original — it makes you likely to repeat mistakes that were already resolved.
Searching as Strategic Exploration
Where you look determines what you find. Search strategies encode assumptions. A search that only confirms a hypothesis is not research — it's motivated reasoning with extra steps.
Information Has Value
Information is produced within economic, political, and social systems. Who funds research, who benefits from a narrative being believed, and who controls distribution are never neutral questions.