Tuesday 6 May 2014

Your Librarians as Researchers

We were busy over the Easter holidays. Not only is it the deadline for spending on new books (we love new books!) but we (Leah and Clare) attended an excellent conference on Information Literacy. We were presenting at the conference and thought you might be interested in some of what we  do as researchers.

For the presentation, we hypothesized that several benefits might come from teaching information literacy skills -- like how to find, evaluate and synthesize scholarly resources -- frequently and quickly, as opposed to the traditional longer, one-off instruction session. After an investigation of some of the relevant psychological and pedagogic literature, we showed how bite-size instruction in two courses at YSJ has correlated with increased NSS scores and positive tutor feedback. We also discussed how we might assess our bite-size instruction and demonstrated some 60 second videos (ILS Shorts) we have developed to support basic skills, which we hope to pursue in a flipped-library approach. 

Some of what we have been doing with your 30 minute drop-in researcher sessions relates to this as well, so depending on how our research develops and ethical review, we may be using these sessions to assess whether a short, frequent approach to information literacy can be useful. Slides below!

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