Over the past few decades, the demand for academic librarians who can teach information literacy skills to college students has steadily increased. This interview study explores how academic librarians in a mid-Atlantic metro area define the roles of librarians and teachers, value their teaching role as librarians, and view their teacher-librarian…

Providing targeted experiences for first-year students both inside and outside the classroom is essential for building connections and creating a foundation for skill development necessary for academic success. Many first-year programs include a standalone course for incoming students or specific content weaved into existing course offerings.…

Extending from existing research on how public libraries offer information literacy (IL) instruction through classes or programs, the purpose of this research was to explore how public librarians provide IL instruction through individual interactions with patrons. US public librarians recorded their impressions of instructional interactions over a…

Using data from a learning module embedded in all first-year seminars, researchers found evidence suggesting that librarians are uniquely qualified to deliver information literacy instruction compared to campus faculty. The study analyzes writing assignments from first-year modules taught by either librarians or campus faculty for two academic…

Supported by institutional commitments to community engagement, undergraduate students at universities across North America are participating in community-based research projects. These experiential learning activities allow students to collaborate with community partners to address issues in their communities, often resulting in co-creating…

Librarians were concerned that transfer students' information literacy skills lagged those of their peers because transfers did not receive the library instruction that other students got in first-year classes. The investigators conducted semi-structured interviews with transfer students to answer two research questions: (1) How do transfer…

Critical information literacy is a way of thinking and teaching that examines the social construction and political dimensions of libraries and information, problematizing information's production and use so that library users may think critically about such forces. Being an educational approach that acknowledges and emboldens learners' agency,…

This study presents three perspectives on the subject of information literacy skills in academia by examining the perceptions of students, teaching faculty, and librarians. Information literacy (sometime referred to as critical thinking or research skills) has become a crucial set of skills in academic work since developments in informational and…

This paper investigated how libraries can support the transition of first-year international undergraduate students to a large research university. The research explored the students' use of libraries, their use of information to learn, and their academic and information literacy learning needs. The methods were a survey (with 135 responses) and…

Graduate students across disciplines feel pressure to publish their scholarship, but they are often unsure how to go about it, partly due to a lack of explicit training in this area. This article discusses the collaborative development of a semester-long Publishing Academy, designed to promote knowledge of scholarly publishing and increase the…

This article builds on the 2007 College and Research Libraries article, "The Librarian, the Machine, or a Little of Both." Since that time, Oakland University Libraries implemented changes to its instruction program that reflect larger trends in teaching and assessment throughout the profession; following these revisions, librarians…

Researchers at Brigham Young University studied first-year students' information evaluation behaviours of open-access, popular news-based, non-academic source material on a variety of subjects. Using think-aloud protocols and screen-recording, researchers coded most and least used evaluation behaviours. Students most used an article's sources,…

Information literacy (IL) is a necessary skill crucial for effective functioning in today's knowledge society. This study seeks to explore Israeli librarians' perspectives toward major components of information literacy. Do librarians find there is a need to redefine the concept? Who do they think should teach it? How do they think Web 2.0…

We test whether and how well the presence of an embedded librarian improves the quality of student research. Students in introductory-level courses tend to have very low levels of research skills and experience. Though faculty are frustrated by this lack of skills, both students and faculty tend to have only a peripheral knowledge of the role…

This case study presents a cocurricular initiative at the Margery Somers Foster Center at Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, NJ. The initiative resulted in an interview workshop for the course Knowledge and Power, a "mission course" of the Douglass Residential College. This discussion-based workshop uses visual and multimedia…