Reference & Instruction
This year’s Banned Books Week theme is “Banning Books Silences Stories. Speak Out!” Activities are being planned around the country — and across the world — that shed light on censorship. It's too late to order print materials, but digital materials can be ordered anytime at https://bannedbooksweek.org/
Just what are faculty looking for when it comes to library outreach? With relatively little formal research available that asks faculty directly about their needs and preferences when it comes to outreach activities, I decided to ask the faculty of a rural community college this question directly using a formal, but low-stakes, survey. Full-article at https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16934/18636
First Draft – a project of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government – uses research-based methods to fight mis- and disinformation online. Their free, one-hour course teaches journalists and the general public how to verify online media, so that they don't fall for hoaxes, rumors and misinformation. Learn more at https://firstdraftnews.org/free-online-course-on-identifying-misinformation/
Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Danah Boyd, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, talks about the challenges media literacy advocates face at the SXSW EDU conference. Full keynote available here.
A new College & Research Libraries News article from Andrea Baer looks the ACRL Framework and how it applies to a "post-truth" world.
Share the Facts, developed by the Duke Reporters' Lab and Jigsaw, offers a new way to share fact-checks and spread them across the Internet. Check it out at https://www.sharethefacts.org/
A new study from Elaine Sullo at George Washington University finds that undergraduate students seek librarian assistance only after they have searched independently without success. Learn more at https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29379
By Andy Kivel, Diablo Valley College
Diablo Valley College has adopted new institutional learning outcomes including:
Information and Technology Fluency. A student who is information and technology fluent will utilize appropriate technology to locate and critically evaluate information from a variety of sources, to formulate responses to issues, reach informed decisions, and communicate effectively. This includes effective written and visual message construction, media choices, leadership skills, and the ability to work with others on projects.
By Julie Cornett, Cerro Coso Community College
Are you already swamped with teaching requests this semester? Do you need some new information literacy assignment and activity ideas? Check out Project CORA! Assignments uploaded in the last couple of months include the following:
Welcome to your local library, which also happens to be a newsroom.
It begins with fun: Playing with the green screen, experimenting with microphones and cameras. Then the San Antonio teenagers move to weightier topics: elections, their take on the news, their stories.
Read more: https://www.poynter.org/news/welcome-your-local-library-which-also-happens-be-newsroom
OCLC's Wikipedia + Libraries project is strengthening ties between US public libraries and Wikipedia, to expand public access to authoritative information and serve public libraries’ diverse communities. The project is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Read more: https://www.webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries.html
The library participates in the campus Student Success Workshops and will be giving a series of 5 workshops. The workshop topics range from: "Is any of it real? Living with Fake news and alternative facts", "10 steps to a research paper" , "Cite precisely: applying MLA & APA", "Research Ingredients: Academic sources for effective research", to collaboration with Counseling and workshops on "Build a better resume" and "Enhancing your job skills".
Inspired by Foothill’s emphasis on student equity, librarians jumped on board a grass roots effort among faculty to create a First Year Experience pilot aimed at students who are the first in their family to go to college (generally the population outlined in the college’s Student Equity Plan). Each student in the program is matched with a personal librarian and takes a one-unit library research class in the same quarter that they’re writing a paper in an English class.
At many colleges, library instruction is not a curricular requirement. The predominant approach to library instruction in community colleges continues to be the provision of face-to-face, course-integrated sessions taught by librarians at the request of teaching faculty. Participating teaching faculty usually schedule a single library instruction session for their classes—the “one-shot”—which may constitute a student’s library instruction session during their undergraduate experience.