Training Students At Small Medium Sized Colleges In Information Literacy

The study profiles the information literacy efforts of sixteen small and mediums sized colleges in North America including: Oberlin College, Ottawa University, Genesee Community College, Marlboro College, Massasoit Community College, Cecil College, Lebanon Valley College, Middlesex Community College, Northeast Community College, Chattanooga State Community College, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, River Parishes Community College, Providence College, Pikes Peak Community College, Rollins College and Schenectady Community College. Librarians from these colleges discuss their information literacy efforts, pointing out what works and does not work for them, trends in encouraging faculty buy in, use of tutorials and various forms of faculty and student outreach, technology and learning space design issues, and many other facets of information literacy education. The emphasis is on plans and best practices.

The report profiles the information literacy efforts of a broad range of North American colleges including: Syracuse University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Windsor, Ulster County Community College, the University of North Texas, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Southeastern Oklahoma University, Central Connecticut State University and Seattle Pacific University. Participants discuss how they promote information literacy at their institutions, how they win support of key faculty and administrators, and how they develop courses, guidelines, tutorials and standards. Other major issues include student assessment, instructor training, integration of info literacy into other curriculums, grants and institutional financial support, the impact of new educational technologies, and the role of learning and computer centers in supporting the info literacy effort, among other issues. Indiana University library officials discuss info literacy efforts for specialized populations, such as athletes, while librarians at the University of California, Berkeley explain their grant funded information literacy outreach program that reaches all corners of the University. University of North Texas librarians relate how they are developing special classrooms to ready themselves for the likely move towards more formal information literacy classes, while faculty at Ulster County Community College explain how the college developed a required information literacy course that is delivered through traditional means and through the college?s distance learning program. Instructional library faculty at North Carolina State Wilmington explain the political process of getting a required information literacy course approved at their university, while Seattle Pacific University librarians discuss the challenges of student assessment. As North American colleges move towards mandated information literacy courses, this study can help information literacy coordinators to reduce the time and effort involved in developing courses and tutorials, and assist them in dealing with in-house politics and in finding useful institutional models and best practices.

The 200-page study looks closely at the information literacy efforts of North American colleges and universities, presenting findings from a survey of more than 50 colleges and universities. The report gives highly detailed data on library use of personnel for instructional purposes, trends in the number of in-class presentations, number of instructors used, students served and classes given. It pinpoints librarian opinion on the information literacy skills of their students in catalog, e-book and database use, facility with QR codes, search engine use, and use of special collections, among other areas. It serves as a guide to how students and information literacy instructors are assessed and what is the role of information literacy in college orientation. The report also gives detailed data on information literacy training requirements for graduation and on information literacy efforts for special populations, such as distance learning students. The report helps library planners to answer questions such as: what are norms for information literacy graduation requirements? What is the perception of the overall level of student skills in use of e-book collections? What percentage of libraries access faculty satisfaction with the information literacy effort? How high a priority is information literacy for college management? What is the role of instructional video in information literacy?

This report presents approximately 125 tables of data exploring how full time college students in the United States view and use and evaluate their college library¿s information literacy training. The data in the report is based on a representative sample of more than 400 full time college students in the United States. Data is broken out by 16 criteria including gender, grade point average, major field of study, income level of students, type and size of college, and mean SAT acceptance score of colleges, among other variables. The report presents data on the percentage of students who have received information literacy training, how they evaluate the effectiveness of that training, how they perceive their need for additional training, whether they believe that an information literacy course should be required, if they have ever used online tutorials provided by the library, and how they evaluate their own information literacy skills. Just a few of the report¿s many findings are that: ¿More than 67% of the students in the sample say that they have received instruction on how to use their college¿s library. Older students are much more likely than younger ones to say that they have not received library or information literacy instruction. ¿Nearly 82% of students at colleges with a mean SAT acceptance score of greater than 1950 say that they have received library or information literacy instruction. ¿Most students find library instruction helpful. About 18.5% of students found the instruction that they received useless or largely useless while 31.72% considered it somewhat helpful and close to half considered it helpful or very helpful.

Information literacy and library instruction are at the heart of the academic library’s mission. But how do you bring that instruction to an increasingly diverse student body and an increasingly varied spectrum of majors? In this updated, expanded new second edition, featuring more than 75% new content, Ragains and 16 other library instructors share their best practices for reaching out to today’s unique users. Readers will find strategies and techniques for teaching college and university freshmen, community college students, students with disabilities, and those in distance learning programs. Alongside sample lesson plans, presentations, brochures, worksheets, handouts, and evaluation forms, Ragains and his contributors offer proven approaches to teaching students in the most popular programs of study, including English Literature Art and Art History Film Studies History Psychology Science Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources Hospitality Business Music Anthropology Engineering Coverage of additional special topics, including legal information for non-law students, government information, and patent searching, make this a complete guide to information literacy instruction.

Teaching Information Literacy to Social Sciences Students & Practitioners is a second discipline-based casebook from ACRL. This volume is based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards and presents cases on learning situations and how they can be analyzed and addressed. Also included are descriptions of instruction sessions for each case, notes, and teaching resources. Each case explicitly reflects one or more of the ACRL Information Literacy Standards.This practical collection of cases and applications brings a new set of resources to librarians doing instruction in the social sciences. Contributors cover such topics as data literacy, visual literacy, and developmental research skills training. Information on teaching undergraduate, graduate, and international students, and how to incorporate information literacy into various social science curricula are also presented.

The new report from Primary Research Group is based on interviews with webmasters from the San Jose Public Library, the Salt Lake City Public Library, the Alexandria Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Public Library, the Houston Public Library, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Colorado Virtual Library and the Boston Public Library. A free sample chapter is available for download. A few of the report?s conclusions are summarized below:CONTENT MANAGEMENTLibraries take widely varying approaches to the issue of how should control the website and who should be empowered to add content to the site. Some libraries prefer to centralize access in the hands of just a few librarians who act as gatekeepers to the website. Others prefer to empower as many librarians as possible to contribute to the site, and to oversee their own contributions to the site. To achieve this, some libraries have purchased off the shelf content management systems, while others have developed in-house content management systems that allow non-technical librarians to function independent of the need for technical help. THE IMPACT OF CASCADING STYLE SHEETS (CSS)Cascading style sheet, that allow librarians to edit entire sites, or subsets of site, with one click of the mouse, have become popular ways to introduce some uniformity and lower the labor demand of editing public library websites. Cascading style sheets are important because librarians are finding more and more reasons to add more and more content to their sites. Public library websites have often quickly become unwieldy monsters that voraciously eat up librarian time. Correcting and editing these beasts by hand is dangerous and cascading style sheets allow proper measured feeding without loss of limb. MOST POPULAR PAGESSome of the most popular pages on the public library websites surveyed were the events calendar, basic library info page, database gateways and children?s and teen pages.STAFFINGRelative to the importance of the library website to the overall success of the library, the size of most library web staffs, when such staffs exist, is quite small. Usually one to three individuals run the website, and they often have other responsibilities. The strategy that most have pursued to overcome their small staffs is to devolve responsibility for content to subject specialist librarians, and to empower them to be able to edit the portions of the website for which they are responsible. UNIQUE CONTENTMost librarians interviewed stressed the need to develop unique content that would draw traffic to the website. Among the type of content mentioned were: interactive storytelling and educational games, reading lists and contests, book reviews by librarians posted online, subject guides, and events calendars. CHILDREN?S & TEEN SERVICESOne of the most vibrant areas for website development has been services for children and teens. This age group grew up with access to the world wide web and it is truly the only generation for which web use and communication is as natural as turning on the television for most Americans. Libraries have responded with books clubs, personalized spaces, interactive stories and games, and other features aimed at this audience. Nonetheless, many libraries have just scraped the surface of their potential in this area. We like what the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Public Library has done in this area, developing unique content, focused marketing and web teams to create a unique site for Charlotte area children. SPECIAL COLLECTIONSMany libraries have plans to digitize their special collections, or at the very least, to digitize finding aids for those collections and increase access to them through the library website. We expect that this will soon become a major area of public library investment and a challenge for website administrators who must devise access schemes to digitized resources.