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NERCOMP 2008 Meeting
Information Literacy: Reinforcing Student Skills Through Two Digital Archives
Session with Claudia Perry, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College/CUNY. Presentation co-authored by David Del Testa, Assistant Professor of History, Bucknell University.
As information literacy is being incorporated into accreditation standards, the teaching of these skills is becoming a broader campus concern rather than simply a "library issue." Historically at Bucknell, information literacy instruction in general has consisted of a series of one-shot, traditional bibliographic instruction sessions with librarians demonstrating various databases and talking about selected reference sources. This approach has led to isolated, inconsistent information literacy among students. Even within a single department, students' research skills and information literacy is generally uneven.
In response to this uneven level of information literacy, faculty within Bucknell's Department of History sought to solidify students' basic historical research skills in introductory courses so students can progress to more advanced historical research. As one step towards this goal, faculty created History 100: Thinking about History. One large component of the course was the World War II Poster Project, a unit designed to embed several information literacy and technology fluency skills into the course. The faculty member teaching the course worked closely with several members of the library/IT staff to create and lead this unit.
The goals of the unit were to:
- Gauge incoming first-year students' information literacy skills by pre-testing them using personal response systems;
- Teach students the basics of historical research at a level appropriate for entering first-year undergraduate students;
- Introduce students to the services available at a university library.
- Give students a hands-on opportunity to work with archival materials and other rare or fragile objects in a library collections and the intellectual tools to think about them;
- Teach students the basics of digital imaging technology, including using digital cameras and working with photo editing software;
- Create a publicly-available digital library to share the university's World War II poster collection and students' research papers about the poster; and to
- Prepare students for their culminating unit assignment: to write a research and analysis paper.
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