Donald A. Barclay

Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.

How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age

Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies

By comparing current abuses of the truth with abuses from the past, this book will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond the post-truth era, and develop highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era

Disinformation

To compete in the digital age, libraries must provide outstanding customer service to their virtual users. Serving Online Customers: Lessons for Libraries from the Business World is a practical guide to help libraries adopt and adapt the best practices of e-business for their own online operations.

Lessons for Libraries from the Business World

Serving Online Customers

Peter Wild

James H. Maguire

The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter---into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy. The accounts of the mountain men are spun from the experiences of a nation moving westward: a trapper returns from the dead; hunters feast on buffalo intestines served on a dirty blanket; a missionary woman is astounded by the violence and vulgarity of the trappers' rendezvous. These are just a few of the narratives, tall tales, and just plain lies that make up A Rendezvous Reader. The writers represented in this book include a dyed-in-the wool trappers, adventuring European nobles, upward-gazing eastern missionaries, and just plain hacks who never unsheathed a Green River knife or traveled farther west that the Ohio River. What these writers have in common is that all of them, whether they dealt mostly in fact of entirely in fantasy, helped to create a uniquely American icon: the mountain man. Though A Rendezvous Reader will certainly be of interest to the historian and the historically curious, the true purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume the liveliest most readable accounts by and about the mountain men. Whether you sample or devour this anthology of mountain horrors and delights, it is a book guaranteed to entertain as well as inform.

Tall, Tangled, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805-1850

A Rendezvous Reader

Not just an exploration of our early Western European roots, these rich chronicles read as literature, first-person narratives of the greatest exploration adventures in historic times. From the Platonic vision of Atlantis to Arthur's Avalon, pre-Columbus Europeans imagined fabulous lands to the west--and after 1492, initial reports of a new world filled with golden El Dorados, warrior queens, and Fountains of Youth merely provided confirmation. Although these dreams were soon tempered by reality, explorers continued to set off with expectation that shaped what they say, how they saw, and how they reacted. This complex of attitudes continues to affect the way we view our world, and these accounts provide an excellent source for insight into the metaphorical systems that have permeated European and American writing about the West since the Sixteenth century. "Into the Wilderness Dreams" draws from the best of three dozen accounts by the Spanish, French, English, and American explorers who came before Lewis and Clark, and explores the roots of present Western Euro-American culture.

Donald A. Barclay

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