From the Frying Pan Into the Fire (and Back Again): Adventures in Subject-Based, Credit Instruction

  My best experience as a teacher-librarian was leading a credit, semester-long course while a librarian at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) during which my students came to care deeply about the topical content and used their developing research skills to further their engagement.  For librarians, though, this is the exception rather than the [...

Re:Purpose Your Event: How the RE:BOOK Altered Book Contest Became a Signature Event at The Claremont Colleges Library

Poster presented at the American Library Association Annual Conference 201

Claremont Colleges Library Social Sciences Research Data Management Pilot

Scholarly communication expertise and responsibility is often located in only a few members of an academic community. Librarians increasingly need to be knowledgeable and articulate about scholarly communication issues, including research data management. How to best leverage librarian expertise and build knowledge in these areas is an ongoing challenge. Stakeholders from two institutions will speak about their efforts to build capacity for data-related support and services in an expedient and economical way. This presentation discusses one of several pilots at the Claremont Colleges Library. In this case, the scholarly communication librarian and a social science librarian created an infrastructure that allows the Library to expand its data services while also creating a transferable professional development model that will educate and leverage expertise around other scholarly communication issues. At Carnegie Mellon University, they have collected information on researcher needs for and attitudes towards university data services from data storage for archiving and sharing, to data management plans and open data for publications, to student and staff training in best data practices. They are working as a committee with members from multiple stakeholders on campus, data services, scholarly communications, office of research, computing services, and discipline liaisons to craft the most efficient and useful menu of data services to support researchers. These examples will set the stage for a robust discussion about how higher education scholarly communication needs can be met in and outside of libraries

Leveraging accreditation to integrate sustainable information literacy instruction into the medical school curriculum

Background: While the term “information literacy” is not often used, the skills associated with that concept are now central to the mission and accreditation process of medical schools. The simultaneous emphasis on critical thinking skills, knowledge acquisition, active learning, and development and acceptance of technology perfectly positions libraries to be central to and integrated into the curriculum. Case Presentation: This case study discusses how one medical school and health sciences library leveraged accreditation to develop a sustainable and efficient flipped classroom model for teaching information literacy skills to first-year medical students. The model provides first-year medical students with the opportunity to learn information literacy skills, critical thinking skills, and teamwork, and then practice these skills throughout the pre-clerkship years. Conclusions: The curriculum was deemed a success and will be included in next year’s first-year curriculum. Faculty have reported substantial improvements in the information sources that first-year medical students are using in subsequent clinical reasoning conferences and in other parts of the curriculum. The effectiveness of the curriculum model was assessed using a rubric

The Generative Power of Teamwork: Using Collaboration to Support GenAI Literacy

The potential impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on the academic community raises numerous questions and answers, many of which have yet to be discovered. As a new and innovative technology, GenAI poses questions about functionality, training data integrity, ethics, intellectual property, and research functionality capabilities. With so many questions and little specific GenAI expertise, librarians at UC San Diego saw an opportunity to bring together experts in various disciplines to address the literacy needs of a campus community and fill the gaps where the campus had no official policy or guidance. In this poster presentation, you will learn how librarians used teamwork and collaboration within and outside the library to create a centralized repository of GenAI information that has been viewed over 7,500 times since its creation in July 2023. The guide focuses on addressing the many questions the campus community has about GenAI in academic work. We will also share information on how to address academic integrity and support GenAI use without encouraging academic integrity violations. In addition, we also describe how a library-wide community of practice and communication channels aid collaboration and help unite our collective efforts to be a resource for the community. We will also discuss the challenges of keeping resources up to date in an involving information environment

Traversing Difficult Tutorial Terrain: Moving from Plagiarism Perils to Student Scholars

According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, academic honesty violations have been on the rise at undergraduate institutions. Is there a role for libraries to play in academic integrity education? In 2013, one college requested that the central consortial library design a plagiarism tutorial for use as a remedial tool for students who had committed academic integrity policy violations. In this presentation, we will discuss that library\u27s experience in developing an interactive online tutorial and associated evaluative tool to teach strategies for being an ethical member of a community of scholars. Throughout the presentation, we will highlight successes and challenges of our implementation approach, as well as concrete strategies for other libraries who are considering adapting this Creative Commons-licensed tutorial or creating their own tool for addressing academic integrity. We will include time for open discussion of the library\u27s role in academic integrity education

A Pragmatic and Flexible Approach to Information Literacy: Findings from a Three-Year Study of Faculty-Librarian Collaboration

While faculty often express dismay at their students’ ability to locate and evaluate secondary sources, they may also be ambivalent about how to (and who should) teach the skills required to carry out quality undergraduate research. This project sought to assess the impact of programmatic changes and librarian course integration on students’ information literacy (IL) skills. Using an IL rubric to score student papers (n=337) over three consecutive first-year student cohorts, our study shows that when faculty collaborate with librarians to foster IL competencies, the result is a statistically significant improvement in students’ demonstrated research skills. Our study also reveals a collaboration “sweet spot”: The greatest gains accrue when librarians provide moderate input into syllabus and assignment design, followed by one or two strategically placed hands-on library sessions. Successful collaboration thus need not entail completely overhauling content courses so as to make library instruction the centerpiece. Quite the opposite, librarians can help reduce the potential burden on faculty by supporting discipline- and course-specific research goals, as well as by sharing resources and best practices in IL pedagogy

Librarians Matter!* Librarian Impact on First-Year Information Literacy Skills at Five Liberal Arts Colleges

This poster reports results of an assessment of student writing from the first-year seminar/experience programs at five separate undergraduate colleges. Papers (n=520) were coded by level of librarian involvement in the class, and then scored using an Information Literacy rubric. Results indicate that students in courses with higher librarian involvement demonstrate better IL skills (that are statistically significant) than those in courses with low involvement

Impact of Assignment Prompt on Information Literacy Performance in First-Year Student Writing

This study attempts to quantify the impact of assignment prompts and phased assignment sequencing on first-year student work. Specifically, whether more fully developed and “scaffolded” assignment prompts produced better Information Literacy (IL) in student papers (n=520). The examination of assignment prompts in relation to student IL rubric scores would seem to indicate the conventional wisdom on developing assignment prompts might not have an impact on IL performance

Impacting Information Literacy Learning in First-Year Seminars: A Rubric-Based Evaluation

The authors conducted a rubric assessment of information literacy (IL) skills in research papers across five undergraduate first-year seminar programs to explore the question “What impact does librarian intervention in first-year courses have on IL performance in student work?” Statistical results indicate that students in courses with greater levels of strategic faculty-librarian collaboration performed significantly better in IL outcomes than those in courses with low collaboration. Intensive librarian course support was not necessary to achieve significant learning gains; these tended to occur when librarians provided initial input into syllabus and assignment design, followed by one or two assignment-focused IL workshops