Many librarians use data from surveys to make decisions about how to spend money or allocate staff, often making use of popular online tools like Survey Monkey. In this era of reduced budgets, low staffing, stiff competition for new resources, and increasingly complex choices, it is especially important that librarians know how to get strong,…

A major responsibility of instruction librarians is to help students develop a more extensive and flexible information literacy repertoire. The teaching and learning of information literacy most often takes place in one of two ways: within the context of single 50-minute library sessions, or at the reference desk. In both cases, it usually takes…

Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop directed the five trustees of her estate to erect a school for Hawaiian children (Bishop 1883). Her wish was to improve the capability and well being of her people through education, and to provide an environment where each would have an opportunity to practice and perpetuate Hawaiian values and traditions. In 2008…

Connectivism is an emerging learning theory positing that knowledge comprises networked relationships and that learning comprises the ability to successfully navigate through these networks. Successful pedagogical strategies involve the instructor helping students to identify, navigate, and evaluate information from their learning networks. Many…

For almost 40 years, the Minute Paper has been a quick and easy means of learning assessment, both in the college classroom and in library instruction. More recently, the use of social media, particularly selfies, has gained popularity by connecting with students through the technology with which they are most familiar. This article makes the case…

This article describes a year-long application of critical information literacy theory for social-science-related library workshops. Each of these workshops had a customized section that included working with special collections and university archives. The students who participated ranged from incoming freshman to seniors at Stanford University.…

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…

In this article, a librarian at Lincoln Memorial University creates library services for an MBA program offered entirely online that is in the early stages of development. The library services include a subject guide and 4 tutorials that will be added to the MBA online orientation. Other services include offering online office hours and…

In a perfect world, school libraries would have unlimited budgets with the latest technology. They would be responsible for one building, staffed with a full-time professional school librarian, paraprofessionals, and a district director. The students, staff, and community would understand the breadth and depth of the school librarian's job.…

In this column, the author discusses a lesson in the credit-bearing information literacy course for honors undergraduates at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). The lesson comes last in a unit including resource instruction, search practice, and culminating in the reading and evaluation of a scholarly work. The course, Honors 235: Research in…

Why is it important to prove that school libraries add value to the school program? The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 20 percent of U.S. public schools lack a full or part-time certified librarian (NCES 2013). In California the ratio of certified school librarians to students is 1:7,374 (California Department of Education…

In 1999, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) convened a national task force to draft Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. ACRL has recently launched a revision to those standards. The original standards were influential because they helped advance a national need in higher education at the time: a…

The Future Voices in Public Services column is a forum for students in graduate library and information science programs to discuss key issues they see in academic library public services, to envision what they feel librarians in public service have to offer to academia, to tell of their visions for the profession, or to tell of research that is…

The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), located in western New York, strives to deliver the same quality library services to its students and faculty located across the globe as those living in the Rochester area. In addition to an array of distance courses and online programs, RIT also has international campuses located in Kosovo, Croatia,…

The easy availability of Internet information has caused many to question the future of libraries. However, librarians, as experts of information science, are even more necessary to help students navigate the Internet. An embedded librarian provides assistance at the most critical point -- exactly when it is needed.