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Southworth Library

Library Instruction Program Guidelines

Information Literacy/Library Instruction in Southworth Library or Your Classroom!

If you would like more hands-on, personal instruction in specific or general information literacy concepts for your class, please consider requesting an information literacy session with an instruction librarian.  Southworth Library has a dedicated instruction librarian who will provide targeted assistance to your class, either in our Instruction Classroom (SL122) equipped with SMARTBoard Technology, or in your own technology-enhanced classroom space.

For specific questions about policies or procedures relating to information literacy instruction, to schedule a library instruction session, or to offer feedback on the instructional activities and offerings, please contact the library.

OBJECTIVES

The Library Instruction Program has three major objectives:

  1. Instruct students to locate and use information related to course assignments
  2. Instruct information literacy and research competencies to instill life-long learning
  3. Use ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education to inform our information literacy instruction :

GUIDELINES

Faculty planning library instruction should consider the following guidelines:

  • Request for library instruction must be made 7 days in advance to ensure librarian and room availability and to give the librarian ample time to prepare for class.
    • Requests made with less than 7 days lead-time may or may not be able to be scheduled depending on the requirements of the instruction session, availability of the time slot, and the availability of a faculty librarian.
  • The instructor should be present at the time of instruction.
  • If the requested instruction is intended to help students with a specific assignment, it is strongly recommended that faculty schedule instruction at a point in the semester when students are aware of the assignment requirements and have had time to consider their research focus.  
  • Library instruction sessions are scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis.
  • Library instruction may be requested for weekday mornings and afternoons.
  • No library instruction will be scheduled when the Library is closed.
  • All library instruction is scheduled through the Library Instruction Request Form on the Southworth Library’s website.

After an instruction session has been scheduled, an instruction librarian will contact you to follow up or request additional information.

Instruction Format

The traditional form of Information Literacy Session is called a "one shot" where students are brought into the Library during a class meeting to go over library and research skills. The one shot can focus on the following topics:

  • Website and catalog 

  • Search Strategies 

  • Popular vs scholarly sources 

  • Specific database searching 

  • Evaluating web sources/CRAAP test 

  • Citation 

  • Plagiarism 

  • Interlibrary Loan 

  • Digital Literacy: Combination of many individual one-shots

  • Copyright Infringement

Information Literacy session can also take the form of multiple, long term sessions depending on what they assignment for your class is.

There is also a virtual tutorial that can take place of a traditional one shot which involves the use of videos and using the skills learned from the videos to help develop your students' information literacy skills. The tutorial can be linked in your Brightspace course. Please contact Leah Fitzgerald for more information.