Book Clubs: Best Practices in Promoting Critical Thinking in Business Classes

The curricular reform movement within education has called for the development of critical thinking skills within the academy. At the authors’ university, the outreach librarian has successfully facilitated several face-to-face book clubs with the goal of honing members’ analytical skills and fostering lifelong learning. As a means of expanding this effort to a formal academic learning objective, the outreach librarian was also virtually embedded into the course management system for several business classes. This article discusses a collaborative faculty/librarian use of online course-related book clubs as a tool for advancing higher level critical thinking skills such as evaluation and reflection.     

Reflecting on Quiz Placement in Online Tutorials: Creating a More Active Learning Experience

As the number of online library tutorials increases, so does the need to create active learning experiences and options for self-assessment. This article looks at embedding short Flash quizzes into tutorials created with Camtasia as a way to address this need. It also attempts to determine how quiz placement affects desire to view online tutorials and information retention.     

Going the Distance (and Back Again): A Distance Education Course Comes Home

Summary

University 300, a course on research and Internet skills, was originally developed at Washington State University for the distance education program. Using a critical thinking approach to the contemporary information environment, the course has grown, evolved, and been transformed into a general education course for the main campus at the university. The course's history shows how strong administrative support and beneficial collaborations across the university transformed the course into an emerging key component of the university curriculum.     

Expanding Librarian Roles Through a Librarian Initiated and Facilitated Faculty Learning Community

The role of libraries is changing to focus more on users rather than the collection of information. Community building and connecting people with shared interests represents a social role for libraries in the information age. Their role adds a new dimension to the traditional domains for libraries. Developing and implementing an integrated medical curriculum became the primary focus of basic sciences faculty at a new medical school. Scholarly teaching and connecting teaching with educational research presented a great challenge for the faculty. In response to the learning, teaching, and developmental needs of faculty members, a librarian established a faculty learning community as an approach to supporting faculty development and growth as teaching scholars and scholars of educational research. The article provides a case to illustrate how a librarian spanned boundaries and took up the responsibilities of establishing a faculty learning community and developing a year-long program in light of different developmental needs of faculty members at the new medical school. It also describes the process of developing the faculty learning community program, its components, and the many roles that the librarian took in implementing the program.     

文检课合作学习教学组织策略的实施

本文介绍了文检课中实施合作学习教学组织策略的经验，阐明了意义和具体做法，总结了五大要素。     

Academic collaborations: Linking the role of the liaison/embedded librarian to teaching and learning

Building partnerships with faculty can be a challenging process for embedded librarians. After defining the essential role of an embedded librarian, this article chronicles the systematic process of how an embedded librarian built a partnership with a faculty member from the education department at a four-year institution. The collaborators created a two-year pilot program to integrate information literacy into a required undergraduate course. The article shares lessons learned about what worked and what did not as they moved through the planning, application, and assessment phases. Their collaboration offered the opportunity to make meaningful changes in the course based on what they learned from students about their anxieties regarding the research process.     

学习型社会中的图书馆员信息素质浅析

在学习型社会的构建中,图书馆员充当着信息素质教育实施主体和客体的双重身份.文章提出了图书馆员在新形势下所应具备的素质,着重分析了教师型馆员的工作困境和工作内涵,并提出了馆员继续教育的途径.     

To Infinity and Beyond: Reducing Textbook Costs Through Librarian/Faculty Collaborations

As subject and distance learning librarians, we have a special interest in supporting our faculty and their needs as they explore alternative and more affordable textbook options for their students. In an increasingly digital environment, there are a wealth of resources available at little or no cost to students. Unfortunately, finding these resources can be challenging and time consuming for faculty. This is where librarians step in. Through careful planning and collaboration with faculty, we can help transition course reading to online and open resources. Librarians can assist in this process by helping faculty identify appropriate resources, helping integrate resources into online learning environments, and providing support for student access to materials. This paper will describe this process from start to finish, utilizing our experience supporting a faculty member with an Ethnobotany course textbook as it was transitioned to an online textbook option.     

Strategies to Ensure Deep Learning Occurs in MBA Information Literacy Workshops

This article reviews various methodologies to ensure engagement by MBA students. It analyses several theoretical models and identifies the most appropriate one for this purpose. It then evaluates and expands upon recent innovations developed at other business schools and presents a case study of inventive teaching techniques employed in workshops by this author to encourage a multifunctional and multidisciplinary approach to undertaking research. The article assesses the integral role imagination and reflection play throughout the process and explores gaming as a possible option for future instructive sessions with this group.     

Wiki Technology Enhanced Group Project to Promote Active Learning in a Neuroscience Course for First-Year Medical Students: An Exploratory Study

A wiki group project was integrated into a neuroscience course for first-year medical students. The project was developed as a self-directed, collaborative learning task to help medical students review course content and make clinically important connections. The goals of the project were to enhance students’ understanding of key concepts in neuroscience, promote active learning, and reinforce their information literacy skills. The objective of the exploratory study was to provide a formative evaluation of the wiki group project and to examine how wiki technology was utilized to enhance active and collaborative learning of first-year medical students in the course and to reinforce information literacy skills.     

Success of reiterative instruction: Looking at faculty-librarian collaboration to improve information literacy in political science education

The purpose of this case study was to ascertain if college students’ information literacy improves through a faculty-librarian collaboration involving a session of library instruction as part of a regular political science course. The authors conducted two surveys to determine if in-person library instruction increases students’ research abilities. The authors surveyed political science faculty to discover their attitudes toward library research instruction. They also surveyed political science students to gauge their opinions on the value of library instruction and to see if there is a connection between their research proficiencies and instruction by a librarian. Through this case study, the authors found that such instruction does improve information literacy. The researchers concluded that for faculty and colleges interested in improving information literacy skills in undergraduate political science students, such library instruction is helpful towards that goal.     

Engaging Students in Active Learning: Use of a Blog and Audience Response System

Librarians provide instruction to medical students as part of a core course in the medical school curriculum. Instruction was provided, in part, through didactic sessions covering professional-level medical information resources, PubMed search skills, psychosocial information, and evidence-based medicine. Librarians redesigned instructional sessions with the goals of increasing student engagement and minimizing the lecture format, maximizing the number of students receiving feedback on their search and evaluation skills, and permitting students to see a variety of possible responses as well as engage in peer- and self-evaluation. Librarians integrated the use of a blog and an audience response system (ARS) into the instruction to help accomplish these goals.     

Voices from the Ground Up: Transfer of Learning within the Context of Research and Study Activities

A mid-sized university library system conducted a large-scale mixed-methods research project intended to understand better the student library experience and ways to enhance it. One aspect of the project included a detailed and iterative analysis of interview data. Using a grounded theory (GT) approach, researchers analyzed empirical data from student interviews and identified patterns of behavior. The results of data analyses suggested that students used knowledge and interactions from library class to inform them of how to study academic content and complete non-research tasks and vice versa. As a result, researchers generated an inductive (emerging from the data) theory that asserts that some research and study activities are mutually informative. The article describes the approach used to develop the theoretical construct in hopes that it will provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between research and studying behaviors and how academic libraries contribute to the greater academic landscape in ways not previously recognized.     

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Textbooks: Opportunities for Academic Libraries

Librarians have a role in working with faculty to provide low-cost alternatives to textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) are an alternative to textbooks in college courses, but there can be barriers to using OER. Are students successful in OER courses? Do faculty see librarians as collaborators in designing courses using OER? What are some alternatives to OER that libraries and library consortia can take advantage of to make college more affordable for students? The following articles address these issues, and the work of the following authors can benefit all types of academic librarians as they contemplate their role in the OER world.     

Evaluating the Intersection Between WorldCat Local and Student Research

The College of St. Benedict and St. John's University Library have used WorldCat Local as a discovery tool since 2008. After four years of use and numerous anecdotes about the difficulties encountered with this product, a committee was formed to test the tool's usability and effectiveness. Seven female and six male students were asked to find appropriate materials within WorldCat Local for a mock research assignment. The students’ research and thought processes were recorded and studied. The recordings were analyzed by the committee, and the search strategies as well as the materials selected by the students were evaluated and scored. Although the sample size limits generalizability, the videos provided an in-depth look into the students’ research processes and their evaluation of what they found. Students generally fared well when asked to identify suitable books for their research topic, but they encountered many difficulties interpreting article records and identifying appropriate articles. Some WorldCat Local interface features appeared to be either the source of student problems or were not used effectively. Anyone wanting to replicate this study in his or her own evaluation of a discovery tool will want to be aware of the issues encountered in this evaluation of WorldCat Local.     

Leveraging Learning Outcomes to Build an Online Information Literacy Tool

This exploratory study applies reflective practice to analyze the role of learning outcomes in developing an online information literacy tutorial. [web address] is a set of ten open access modules that build graduate-level academic literacies and research skills. At the heart of the modules is a set of rigorously crafted learning outcomes that provide the foundational structure on which the self-paced tool is built. Using Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, this study traces how learning outcomes framed an iterative four-stage design process. Drawing on these findings, we offer considerations for teams developing online learning tools for information literacy and research skills.     

Library as a Partner in Co-Designing Learning Spaces: A Case Study at Tampere University of Technology,Finland

This article presents a case of co-designed temporary learning spaces at a Finnish academic library, together with the results of a user-survey. The experimental development of the multifunctional spaces offered an opportunity for the library to collaborate with its parent organisation thus broadening the role of the library. Hence, library can be seen as a third player facilitating learning spaces. Additionally, the library's own expertise was strengthened through successful cooperation with the undergraduate students and other actors. The results support prior research, where studying in the library is target-oriented differing from other learning spaces in providing support and resources.     

A New Student Learning Focus for the Academic Library: From Geographical Proximity of the Learning Commons to Organizational Proximity within the Library

In 2015, student learning programs at the University of Saskatchewan moved organizationally to the university library. While these services resided physically in the library as part of the Learning Commons partnership, this recent change presents the library with a new focus and responsibility for broader student learning support and academic skill development. Highlighting examples of organizational integration of student learning support, this article uses a proximity perspective, suggesting that geographical proximity of services in the learning commons does not go far enough to achieve the deeper collaboration and integration necessary for holistic and integrated learning, and that organizational proximity is needed.     

Building Research Competencies in Canadian Academic Libraries: The CARL Librarians' Research Institute

This article overviews work by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) to build the workforce competencies and capacity of academic librarians in respect of librarian research skills. CARL's Librarians' Research Institute (LRI) is reviewed and evaluated as a case study example of strategic and collaborative workforce capacity building. The CARL LRI offers a model for possible replication by others seeking to build workforce competencies and capacity through collaborative action.     

Learning to Love Your Discovery Tool: Strategies for Integrating a Discovery Tool in Face-To-Face,Synchronous, and Asynchronous Instruction

Some librarians embrace discovery tools while others refuse to use them. This lack of consensus can have consequences for student learning when there is inconsistent use, especially in large-scale instruction programs. The authors surveyed academic librarians whose institutions have a discovery tool and who teach information literacy classes in order to identify barriers to using them and to develop strategies to effectively integrate them into instruction. The authors used the survey results and recent studies on the research habits of undergraduates to propose strategies for integrating the discovery tool at the programmatic level in a more meaningful and sustainable way.