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…

The growing importance of the Internet in our society requires that university graduates be skilled in critical evaluation of the messages and sources present in the online world. Traditional efforts to teach these skills have relied on specific, checklist-like tools; recently, these approaches have rightly come under criticism for being…

Instruction is a vital part of the academic librarian's public services mission, but the teaching efforts of special collections librarians can be overlooked due to the culture and particularities of teaching in an archival setting. This article documents the challenges special collections librarians face in integrating their teaching program…

The University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) is known for strong programming in the sciences and a teaching faculty at the forefront of science education and reform. Librarians at CU-Boulder, in collaboration with science faculty, are challenged to improve undergraduate science education. Using rare, historic, and artistic works from Special…

Rubrics are a rapidly growing subfield of information literacy assessment, providing a powerful tool for understanding student learning. This paper explores the role that the creation and application of an information literacy rubric can play in program development. Because of the Information Literacy in Student Writing assessment project at…

This article explores the closing of the Howard Ross Library of Management at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. We hypothesized that closing a branch library would result in a decline in the use of library services. We measured library service using circulation statistics, library instruction workshop statistics, and data from the online survey…

Affective learning relates to students' attitudes, emotions, and feelings. This study focuses on measuring affective learning during library instruction by using a student response system. Participants were undergraduate students who received course-related library instruction for a research assignment. Students rated their confidence levels…

Little is known about the intellectual journey of advanced undergraduates engaged in the research process. Moreover, few studies of this population of library users include students' personal essays as a point of analysis in their scholarly pursuits. To gain insights into the research trajectory of apprentice researchers at the University of…

Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on narrative theory, composition scholarship, and investigations into the affective dimensions of the research process, this article discusses stories written by college students about their experiences locating, evaluating, and using information in the context of academic research. These narratives…

This study investigates whether the type of instruction (a single face-to-face librarian-led instruction, instructor-led instruction, or an online IL course--the Online Research Lab) has an impact on student information literacy gains in a Freshman English Composition program. A performance-based assessment was carried out by analyzing…

Academic librarians provide information literacy instruction and research services to graduate students. To develop evidence-based library instruction and research services for incoming graduate students, the authors interviewed fifteen incoming graduate students in the social sciences and analyzed the interviews using the Association of College &…

Some of the most enduring, and engaging, questions within academic librarianship are those about students and research skills. The vocabulary employed for discussion has evolved, but essential questions--what skills do students need to be taught, who should teach them, and how?--have persisted from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.…

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept…

In this article, I imagine a library that prioritizes teaching users how to find, evaluate, and use information over the traditional library public service activities of collection development, access to materials, and reference services. If I ran the library, all services would support end-user education. (Contains 1 graph and 1 note.)

This paper describes an exploratory study investigating the impact of problem-based learning and clicker technology as active learning strategies at the American University of Sharjah Library, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Studies compared traditional and active learning classes. The present article maps the successes and challenges of these unique…