Curriculum-Integrated Information Literacy (CIIL) in a Community College Nursing Program: A practical Model

This article describes a strategy to integrate information literacy into the curriculum of a nursing program in a community college. The model is articulated in four explained phases: preparatory, planning, implementation, and evaluation. It describes a collaborative process encouraging librarians to work with nursing faculty, driving students to acquire information literacy competencies, to use information resources as part of their learning process, and to be lifelong learners. The literature reviews the evolution of the concept of informatics in nursing practice and the different blueprints organized to attain information literacy competencies. It also describes studies that have included these competencies into nursing curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Program-Integrated Information Literacy (PIIL) in a Hospital\u27s Nursing Department: A Practical Model

This article provides a systematic description of a strategy to integrate information literacy into programs that support professional development in hospitals\u27 nursing departments. Four phases are explained: preparatory, planning, implementation, and evaluation. It suggests that librarians must go beyond the basic one-time instruction workshops to a collaborative model working with nursing management so that nurses and nursing students will use information resources as part of their learning process and obtain the needed skills to be information literate, users of evidence-based information, and life-long learners. The literature reviews the concept of informatics in nursing practice and some of the different programs set up to acquire information literacy competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER

Evidence-Based Practice Mentors: Taking Information Literacy to the Units in a Teaching Hospital

This article describes Evidence-Based Mentors, an integrated strategy with librarian participation, aimed to motivate and assist nurses in the search and use of literature and evidence-based information for nursing practice in a teaching hospital. The librarian\u27s role goes beyond searching the literature to involvement in teaching critical appraisal of information. It details the evidence-based process, including the use of the PICO model, the categorization of resources, and the synthesizing that lead to the change of nursing practices that impact on outcomes directly related to patient recovery, organizational effectiveness, and nursing competency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

Website Usability Testing with Custom Tools in a Community College Environment

Library webpages are at the core of contemporary library services, and should be updated frequently, based on well-defined user-generated data. This means that technical decisions should not be the only the factors considered when updating web content. When building a library web presence, we should aim to overcome the mistaken idea that gathering user input on design is difficult or unwieldly. To bring this mindset to our community college library, in 2016 we received a grant to fund a usability study. This study aimed at gathering quantitative data to support data-based decisions about our library website. The goal was ultimately to improve the use of our college library webpages measurably. The methodological approach was to build a testing environment (mostly in JavaScript), where students could interact with prototype webpages to execute a number of pre-defined tasks. We also used a subscription-based analytics tool to record users’ interactions with these prototypes. This allowed us to gather a significant amount of data on how users carry out tasks on the various prototype library webpages. Yet despite our best efforts at pre-testing our technology setup, the combination of technologies that we initially chose failed dramatically in a real testing environment. Specifically, the proprietary subscription-based analytics software we used did not work as intended, and was almost impossible to debug. Our project came to a sudden stop because of technical issues that we found very difficult to resolve. After much consternation and some time spent reflecting on the problem, the solution was to build our own tool to gather usability analytics, rather than rely on a third party solution. We built a service that uses Flask, a Python web micro-framework, to transform the data created by participants’ interactions with the prototypes into a CSV file, a format that is easy to open and work with in spreadsheets such as Excel. We learned several important lessons from this experience: There is value in building your own tools, which are often easier to use, understand and debug than proprietary tools. Moreover, using homegrown tools can also create a more user-friendly environment for participants. Most importantly, homegrown tools can ultimately increase the quality and reliability of the collected data. The tools we built are now openly licensed allowing others to benefit from our work. Once we had built the technologies we needed, we were able to move forward and successfully complete our grant project. After several rounds of testing and refining our prototypes, we had gathered significant data, and developed recommendations that will ultimately move our library toward a more user-friendly and well-tested web interface that better suits the needs of our stakeholders. Our students, faculty and administrators will all benefit from our study and the improvements implemented as a result

Usability Study for a Community College Library Website: A Methodology for Large-Scale Data Gathering

Usability studies (UX) are increasingly common in libraries. A UX methodology is a useful tool to support librarians’ decision-making processes during a website (re)design. This article describes a UX process using a custom-built usability-testing environment and a data-collection tool, written in JavaScript and Python respectively. The resulting automated approach allowed us to collect usability data from a sample of 225 students. The methodology described in this study will be of interest to those considering or planning a UX study in their libraries

Information Literacy Instruction and Assessment in a Community College: A Collaborative Design

This article describes practical steps taken in the planning of an integrated information literacy instruction linked to a course assignment for community health majors at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. The library sessions integrated the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and were based on faculty-librarian collaboration. A course outline was designed to support a step by step course project. Tools to collect evidence of student learning were designed and adjustments to the course plan and activities were made based on those assessments. Suggestions for using these tools in an iterative design process are made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER

Imaging Galactic Dark Matter with High-Energy Cosmic Neutrinos

We show that the high-energy cosmic neutrinos seen by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory can be used to probe interactions between neutrinos and the dark sector that cannot be reached by current cosmological methods. The origin of the observed neutrinos is still unknown, and their arrival directions are compatible with an isotropic distribution. This observation, together with dedicated studies of Galactic plane correlations, suggests a predominantly extragalactic origin. Interactions between this isotropic extragalactic flux and the dense dark matter (DM) bulge of the Milky Way would thus lead to an observable imprint on the distribution, which would be seen by IceCube as (i) slightly suppressed fluxes at energies below a PeV and (ii) a deficit of events in the direction of the Galactic center. We perform an extended unbinned likelihood analysis using the four-year high-energy starting event data set to constrain the strength of DM-neutrino interactions for two model classes. We find that, in spite of low statistics, IceCube can probe regions of the parameter space inaccessible to current cosmological methods.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant PHY-1505858)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant PHY-1505855