Faculty Guide to the Library

Librarians are available all 12 months of the year to help students build their information literacy skills. Each instruction session is customized to introduce your students to the best resources for their research assignment.

Presentation options could include:

• one-shot visits to introduce parts of the research process
• multiple sessions throughout the semester to scaffold the lessons as they progress
• custom lessons to reflect a wide variety of disciplines
• short introductory visits to your classroom

Ask us about adding a librarian to your D2L class! Having the librarian in your virtual classroom makes it even easier for students to contact us -- and opens up new possibilities for interaction.

We recommend adding us in the Faculty or the Teaching Assistant roles. The greater degree of engagement, the more we recommend the Faculty role (otherwise you'll need to create modules and discussion boards on your librarian's behalf).

Interaction can range from the relatively hands-off all the way through actively engaging students in discussion board conversations or giving feedback on low-stakes formative assessments. (Hint: making these interactions a required part of the assignment gets better results! Otherwise you tend to see the better students being the ones willing to take advantage of the optional-only support.)

Research guides can be created for your class to help direct your students to the most helpful databases, possible book titles, and trustworthy websites as they work on your specific assignment. Examples of guides can be found below:

You know what you're looking for -- but do your students? Set your students up for success by writing out detailed assignment instructions without taking for granted that they'll just know that an English class of course uses MLA (or what that even means). A librarian can be your extra set of eyeballs to help you catch what you may have overlooked...before your students all start bombarding you with emails.

Some tips on research assignments:

• Do some preliminary research yourself (or with a librarian) to make sure articles are available to support the topic(s).
• Double-check our list of databases to confirm what we have access to, especially if you use an assignment with another school.
• Explicitly name a pre-established style guide (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc) to provide paper formatting and citation rules for your students. Avoid customizations: students get frustrated by styles seeming to change in every class!
• Ask for a variety of resources rather than exclusively scholarly articles from the databases: students will have to think harder to select books and websites that are appropriate.