Skip to Main Content

Faculty - Library Instruction Program: Faculty - Library Instruction Program

Library Instruction Program

Faculty librarians teach information literacy to students and faculty in a variety of ways in support of campus instructional programs. These efforts integrate research skills into the curriculum of General Education, graduate programs, and other programs as necessary, contributing to student success, persistence, time to graduation, graduation rates, and lifelong learning after graduation.

Program Mission Statement & Goals

The University Library’s Instruction Program supports the University’s educational mission and prepares lifelong learners by partnering with academic programs to develop students' information literacy skills in a highly dynamic research environment.

The Library’s Instruction Program goals are to:

  • Maintain a dynamic and multi-faceted program that reaches every CSU Stanislaus student

  • Ensure that all Stanislaus students graduate with college-level information literacy skills by collaborating with faculty

  • Engage with students to foster a passion for lifelong learning

  • Assess for continuing improvement

Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Embedded Librarianship

The library instruction program serves programs with in-person and online instruction. Librarians collaborate with the instructor on session goals, demonstrating research strategies, concepts, skills, tools, and time for students to practice. Our online tutorials, or "How-Tos" are tailored to courses or to broader goals. 

Rather than teach information literacy separately, librarians partner with faculty in their programs and courses to integrate information literacy into their instructional goals.   Although librarians are well placed to teach information literacy, faculty are also experts at citation and discipline-specific sources that upper division and graduate students must learn.  Best practices suggest that librarians and faculty collaborate in order to integrate information literacy instruction into the disciplinary writing process.

Curriculum

According to the American Library Association (ALA) Committee on Information Literacy report, an information literate person is one who is “able to recognize when information is needed,” knows what information is needed to address a given problem or issue, and, beyond that, has “the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information."

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2015) from Academic, College, and Research Libraries (ACRL), lists the six frames each consisting of a concept central to information literacy, a set of knowledge practices, and a set of dispositions:

  • Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
  • Information Creation as a Process
  • Information Has Value
  • Research as Inquiry
  • Scholarship as Conversation
  • Searching as Strategic Exploration

Embedded Librarianship

  • Librarians teach on average 80 sessions per semester for department instructors.  This robust program allows information literacy to be incorporated into Freshman Composition, General Education, and upper division courses when research assignments are required.
  • Many graduate programs include information literacy instruction by librarians to enhance instruction in primary resources, discipline databases, correct citation, and correct formatting of the thesis.

Library Computer Instruction Lab

The library computer instruction lab L260 is vital to librarian’s information literacy pedagogy.  We support faculty requests for one-shot sessions just in time for research assignments with a lab environment where each student sits at a computer.  We strongly encourage faculty to request librarians to teach information literacy in the library, where students can best learn how to engage with print and online materials.  The lab can be made available to other programs on an ad hoc basis (not semester-long courses) if timeslots are open after librarians have scheduled their own instruction.  Contact Tim Held theld@csustan.edu for more information.

Instruction Assessment

The library instruction program is engaged in ongoing assessment.

  • We carried out a multi-phase assessment of our course-integrated instruction in 2009-2010 by surveying faculty on how well the goals for our sessions were met in students' products
  • In a 2010 online collaboration for ENGL 1002, a faculty member included library instruction assessment questions on his larger assessment instrument
  • In First Year Experience library session, minute papers have been used to get immediate feedback on students' learning, and we will used a rubric to directly assess student products for writing and research skills
  • The library instruction coordinator developed an information literacy rubric to apply to general education and senior writing to assess information literacy as a campus core competency

Library Assessment Data

Instruction Program Assessment Reports:

Library User Survey Results