Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Like most librarians, I teach one-shot instruction sessions for numerous departments across campus on myriad topics. Fortunately, most faculty give me the entire class period to go over research techniques and evaluating sources. Prior to 2017, my discussion around evaluating sources happened towards the end of the class period, after I had demoed a few databases and searched the library catalog. This worked until it didn’t anymore. After the 2017 presidential inauguration, faculty and students returned to a more complex classroom climate, accentuated by tension, fear, and sadness.

Because of this new climate, I noticed a change in instruction requests. …

A year ago I started the Zine Collection at Simmons with just $100.

A year ago I decided to approach one of my Sociology faculty members with the idea of incorporating zines in her class. She and I are both from the Riot GRRRL era and produced our own zines. She was game. We decided to test pilot zines with her Inequality course which has a mixture of sociology students and nursing students. We hoped this would allow her students to connect more with the material.

Why zines?

Anyone providing information literacy workshops and instruction can attest that it is a hard sell. There is a plethora of published literature on the phrase information literacy and what it implies in regards to our students. I am of the belief that using the word literacy has negative connotations. The word itself suggests to students that they are illiterate and deficient in some significant way. What this inevitably does is put our students on the defensive before we even begin instruction. While it may seem like mere semantics, the language we use matters. I want my students to feel comfortable …

It is a well-documented problem within higher education of how to convey information literacy skills to students in a way that is not only effective but relevant to their lives. When librarians stand in front of the classroom and present the world of databases, books, and scholarly articles, half the class is already drifting off. The challenge is to get the students interested in learning more about the resources available to them so that they can apply them to their current academic work and beyond.

Harrison College, an Indiana-based for-profit college, began requiring a two-credit, 12-week course in information literacy …