Education Commons^™

Leveraging Resources Across Units And Universities To Address Academic Literacies And Research Skills In Ontario Graduate Students, Melanie Mills, Elan Paulson

Western Libraries Presentations

Student2Scholar (S2S) is a fully online and open course that aims to teach academic literacies and research skills to social science graduate students. Set to launch in December 2015, S2S was conceived of and created by a diverse and distributed team of academic librarians, university staff, and graduate students from three Ontario Universities: Western, the University of Toronto, and Queen’s. Members of the project team brought with them varying degrees of experience and expertise across a range of disciplinary and teaching and learning backgrounds, including: adult education, information literacy, and online learning (to name only a few).

S2S serves as …

“I Am More Productive In The Library Because It’S Quiet”: Commuter Students In The College Library, Mariana Regalado, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

This article discusses commuter students’ experiences with the academic library, drawn from a qualitative study at the City University of New York. Undergraduates at six community and baccalaureate colleges were interviewed to explore how they fit schoolwork into their days, and the challenges and opportunities they encountered. Students identified physical and environmental features that informed their ability to successfully engage in academic work in the library. They valued the library as a distraction-free place for academic work, in contrast to the constraints they experienced in other places—including in their homes and on the commute.

It Takes A University: Oer And The Psu Reduce Student Costs Initiative, Marilyn K. Moody

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

OER have a major role to play in student affordability efforts. Portland State University’s Reducing Student Costs Initiative is a broad-based effort to reduce student textbook and course materials costs. This presentation looks at the opportunities and challenges of involving stakeholders from across the campus in this initiative, including faculty, staff, students, administrators, donors, and external partners. OER related strategies of the Initiative, including plans for increasing OER use in courses and programs are described.

The Initiative’s work and implementation plans involving the adoption, use, and creation of OER include:

• Developing courses and programs that utilize OER, including online flexible …

The Academic Library's Role In Student Retention, Kellian Clink

Library Services Publications

Student retention is critical to job security, but most importantly, we who work in academe are entrusted with our students’ dreams. While there are many factors that enter into students’ eventual graduation from college, the library can help by understanding some of the basics of the literature of student retention and then by creating spaces, collections, and personnel who are responsive to student needs. This session at PNLA’s 2015 conference outlined research about student retention, summarized some of the reasons that it matters, and offered up some strategies that the author’s library is using to be part of an overall …

Serving The Commuter College Student In Urban Academic Libraries, Mariana Regalado, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

Cities often host many colleges and universities; while the commuter student in suburban or rural areas may drive or be driven to school, students at colleges and universities in dense, urban settings rely predominantly on mass transit for their commute to class. The act of commuting to campus has been found by a number of researchers to define and shape the experiences of commuter students in college, though the literature on college students who commute is not extensive. A qualitative study of the academic culture and scholarly habits of undergraduate students at the City University of New York (CUNY) revealed …

Adult Learners In The Library–Are They Being Served?, Makiba Foster, Kristine Helbling

University Libraries Publications

Like many academic librarians, after completing the marathon of the traditional school year, we often use the summer semester to reflect, revise, and plan for the upcoming fall. In the summer of 2012, during a casual conversation in which we shared stories about rewarding reference interactions, we stumbled upon an “aha moment,” discovering an opportunity to connect targeted library outreach with an underserved user group. During this exchange, we realized how much we both enjoy working with adult learners and how they always seem genuinely interested in gaining skills to make themselves better library users, and therefore better students. This …

Facilitating Peer Learning In The Library: Crafting The Perfect Batch Of Undergraduate Peer Research Mentors, Clinton K. Baugess, Mallory R. Jallas

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Librarians at a college library developed a Peer Research Mentor (PRM) program for undergraduate students in order to facilitate peer learning and expand the library's formal instruction program beyond the traditional reach of the library and librarians. The presenters will discuss recruiting the initial cohort of eight PRMs, strengthening PRMs' research skills through an intensive training curriculum, and an overview of the various instructional outreach projects that have been designed and implemented by PRMs for other students. The presentation will discuss program assessment methods, share findings from the current cohort, and outline plans for the program's development.

If You Build It, Will They Come? Building The Collaborative Infrastructure And The Ohiolink Collaborates Toolbox, Barbara J. Strauss, Margaret Maurer, Julie Gedeon

Margaret Beecher Maurer

This research examines how libraries are collaborating, why libraries collaborate, and seeks the environmental conditions that foster successful cross-institutional collaborations. The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) Consortium’s CollaboraTeS Project is examined, to inventory expertise and needs within the OhioLINK community and the members’ willingness to share, barter or contract their expertise with other OhioLINK institutions. This is followed by an examination of a sample of North American collaborative projects to identify environmental conditions that foster collaborations in North American libraries. A brief survey within the OhioLINK environment was then conducted that validated anecdotal evidence that the CollaboraTeS Toolbox has …

Library Instruction And Themed Composition Courses: An Investigation Of Factors That Impact Student Learning, Erin E. Rinto, Elisa I. Cogbill-Seiders

Library Faculty Publications

Many academic libraries partner with English composition in order to teach first year students skills related to academic research and writing. Due to the partnership between information literacy and first-year writing programs, it is important to evaluate how these programs can best support one another. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of two factors on student information literacy skill development: library instruction and section theme—defined here as class sections of the English 102 (ENG 102) program developed around a central topic selected by the instructor. A random sample of annotated bibliographies from 95 sections of ENG …

Libraries & Student Success, Melissa Bowles-Terry

Library Faculty Presentations

What makes a difference in student success? The framing questions for this presentation are:

1. What makes students stay in college and finish a degree? What prevents them from finishing?

2. What can librarians and faculty do to increase students' chances of succeeding at learning and at earning a degree?

This presentation will address high impact practices identified by George Kuh and adopted by the AAC&U, and give some examples of how libraries can support those high impact practices. It will also address student engagement, as measured by tools like the National Survey of Student Engagement or NSSE, and how libraries can …

Situating Information Literacy In The Disciplines: A Practical And Systematic Approach For Academic Librarians, Robert Farrell, William Badke

Publications and Research

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to consider the current barriers to situating in the disciplines and to offer a possible strategy for so doing.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews current challenges facing librarians who seek to situate information literacy in the disciplines and offers and practical model for those wishing to do so. Phenomenographic evidence from disciplinary faculty focus groups is presented in the context of the model put forward.

Findings – Disciplinary faculty do not have generic conceptions of information literacy but rather understand information-related behaviors as part of embodied disciplinary practice.

Practical implications – Librarians …

Awareness And Perception Of Copyright Among Teaching Faculty At Canadian Universities, Lisa Di Valentino

FIMS Publications

This article describes the background, methodology, and results of a study undertaken in 2014 to determine university faculty awareness and perceptions of copyright as it affects their teaching. An online survey questionnaire was distributed to teaching faculty across Canada, seeking feedback about the copyright policies and training opportunities at their institutions, where they go for copyright assistance, and how they would respond to various copyright-related scenarios that may arise in the course of teaching.

Most of the respondents are aware of the copyright policies or guidelines at their universities, but much fewer know whether or not their institution offers copyright …

Assessment In Academic Libraries, Gregory Smith

Gregory A. Smith

Academic library assessment has a rich history, its roots being traceable to a time when today’s information technologies were beyond the realm of imagination. The field has developed at an accelerating pace for more than 40 years, fueled by scholarly and creative output within and beyond the field of library/information science. Prevailing economic, political, and technological conditions have already thrust assessment into the mainstream of academic library operations around the world, and this trend is unlikely to be reversed. In the past 20 years, advocates for library assessment have developed new venues for intellectual exchange, launching conferences and journals focused …