When the COVID-19 pandemic forced universities in China to abruptly transition to virtual instruction, library services adapted quickly to provide research services, instruction, and access to collections. The library at NYU Shanghai was about to begin its sixth year of providing library research workshops to Freshmen enrolled in foundational…

This personal narrative describes strategies for incorporating relevant lived experience as narrative storytelling during library instruction in an academic classroom setting. Integrating personal narrative into curriculum is proposed as a technique for expanding instruction librarians' development as teachers and mentors, and for motivating and…

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Understanding by Design instructional design framework can be applied to design high-quality single-session information literacy instruction. The author describes the Understanding by Design process in detail, noting modifications for single instructional session design with examples from the…

The literature on academic librarians' teaching experience consistently reflects a disconnect between the education Library and Information Science (LIS) graduates receive and the knowledge and skills they need to perform their jobs. The goal of this study is to assess the current state of instruction and user education courses in graduate…

Citation management programs are tools used to organize references and to create citations and bibliographies. Libraries are often the central point for providing training and support in using these tools. To determine how we could improve our support and training services, we surveyed users to determine what software in being used, why they chose…

To better engage our graduate students, we asked them to describe their research strategy and challenges, helpful research support services, and their preferred venue for learning research skills. We conducted a thematic analysis and found that participants' top reported research strategies included "Research Topic Development" and…

In this study, researchers used basic qualitative research to understand the spaces, resources, and services available to K12 students in their school libraries. Using observation and semi-structured interviews with K12 teacher librarians, this research allowed for a comparison of the K12 and post-secondary environments through which the authors…

The Mystery Room is an educational escape room based on information literacy and applied to multiple audiences, including first-year students and library student employees. In this article, we explain how we developed the game, its theoretical underpinnings, and why it's a flexible workshop for a variety of audiences.

The University of Baltimore Library was recently renovated. Part of the design in the newly renovated space was having one single service point, that we call the Information Desk. This desk serves as the public facing portal for what was previously three public facing service points to services by three separate departments, Academic Success,…

Outreach programs remain essential in fostering the use of library collections and services. A review of one hundred seventy-four papers on academic library outreach from 2008 to January 2019 highlighted the popularity of these programs during this period as well as the identification of five themes. These themes point to the importance of library…

Librarians and staff at a public university drew upon previous experience with instructional games to develop, implement, and assess a card game as a library orientation activity for new transfer students. This project was shaped by a desire to meet transfer students' unique needs as well as the logistical constraints associated with the…

In reflective practice, librarians think back on their instruction to improve it, and this study addresses guidance provided for reflection on citation management instruction. We refined a previously developed reflective practice template for citation management instruction by asking instructors to critique the template's set of reflective…

Brittany Brannon is an MLIS candidate in the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University. In this essay, she makes an argument for incorporating a rhetorical approach when assisting students with their information seeking and use. A rhetorical approach focuses on how the student will use the information they seek, and thus…

"Special Libraries, Special Challenges" is a column dedicated to exploring the unique public services challenges that arise in libraries that specialize in a particular subject, such as law, medicine, business, and so forth. In each column, the author will discuss public service dilemmas and opportunities that arise in special libraries.…

Academic libraries are one of the most important sources of "on the job" training for future library instructors. Librarians who supervise and assess these future library instructors (often in graduate assistant positions) often choose to provide observations and feedback each semester to these instructors in training. Scholarly…