Information Literacy: Valuable for Both Lower- and Upper-division Undergraduates

Here's a message I shared on the Information-literacy and instruction listserv.  Thought it might be good to share on my blog:

Information literacy should not be placed solely in the lower-division, undergraduate courses.  They should be integrated into the upper-division courses, where students should be learning about the resources, evaluation methods, and legal uses of information specific to their field of study.

One of my colleagues who recently served on the Curriculum Council succeeded in pitching the idea of information literacy.  In fact, with the recent campus move to update and improve our general education requirements, the committee added an information-literacy component to the list of desired student learning outcomes.  According to the GenEd Revision Committee, each Idaho State University student ought to "locate relevant sources and use them critically and responsibly."

Now we need to create a one-credit course to help students fulfill this objective.  We are working to collaborate with departments, so that appropriate courses already in the catalog may include information-literacy components.  Hopefully, we can teach the teachers and help them teach their students to become information literate in their fields.  In other words, we like the idea of courses in the major requiring information-literacy components.

We are also working to get a librarian on the correct committee that oversees the GenEd program to ensure that any courses designated as an IL course do indeed incorporate IL components.

If you have ideas on creating IL courses, becoming embedded in upper-division courses, and working with departments, please continue to share on this listserv.  I've been searching the archives.

For any who are interested, below are some links to our GenEd revisions and outcomes:

• Revised Objectives and Outcomes for General Education Literacy
• General Education Requirements

Thank you for letting me share what I consider a success, though it is just the beginning for us.

Teaching Instructors and TAs How to Incorporate Information Literacy in their Classrooms

Esther Grassian, a respected and well-known information-literacy librarian, at UCLA, has created a Libguide to help instructors and TAs teach their students to become information literate.  The Libguide offers exercises and information that can be used directly in the classroom--see the tabs on the Libguide.

She has also co-authored two editions of the following book with Joan Kaplowitz: Information literacy instruction : theory and practice.  The ISU Library has this book: Call Number ZA3075.G73 2009. 

Ms. Grassian, thank you for your dedication to information literacy and librarianship.

Wordle Images

Here's a fun site that can help you create an image that is both relevant to your project and visually appealing: Wordle.  It allows individuals to paste text from a document, a website, or wherever, and it will create a word graphic.  Also, a field appears where you can paste in a website, a blog URL, or a blog feed.  It even lets people enter their delicious user name, so it can create a graphic with words from their bookmarks.

This graphic shows words taken from this blog:

Take a look at a graphic of my Delicious bookmarks:

 

The above graphic links directly to the larger image on Wordle.net, but the one below does not.

Once the website address or the Delicious username gets entered into the proper field, the graphic appears.  Then the fun begins.  The color, the font, and the layout can all be changed.  If you do not feel particularly creative, just hit the "Randomize" button, and it will change all of these things.

Here's another Wordle showing my Delicious tags:

Again, here's the larger image:

Finding Open Access Scholarship and Information about Open Access

I completed a display on open access publishing today.  I learned that researchers at ISU can find open access journals via our A-Z Journal List.  For example, a search for Communications in Information Literacy will return a page like this:

The green hyperlinks take users to the Communications in Information Literacy homepage, where a username and password is required to access their articles, but it is still free.

Anyone can find and use open-access (OA) journals.  To browse and search OA journals, take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is also known as the DOAJ.   Take a look at Mallikarjun Dora's post on the "Growth of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)."  The post includes a useful graph to visualize the increase in the number of journals available with open access research articles.

Even more open-access articles can be found on the following sites:

•  Hindawi Publishing: a rapidly growing publisher with more than 200 open-access journals
• PLoS ONE: the world's largest journal.

For more information about open access, look at the Galter Health Sciences Library's "Open Access Resources Guide."  This library serves the Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Most of the information I gathered came from Peter Suber's "Overview of Open Access."  Find definitions and learn the differences between Gratis OA and Libre OA.  It is really quite a useful site if you want to understand more about OA, copyright, Creative Commons, etc.

Other useful sites on the topic include, though certainly are not limited to:

• Open Access Week
• SPARC: Scholarly Publishers and Academic Resources Coalition
• SPARC Newsletter
• Education Podcasts on OA
• Vimeo's Open Access Videos

The head of our acquisition's department says that scholarly journal inflation rates typically rise 9%  each year.  Normal inflation tends to be just 3% each year.  Some scholarly journals cost as much as a brand new car.

 

See here. 

In a good year when academic library budgets do not get cut, it may still mean some academic journals get axed, due to the high inflation rate.  Perhaps this is why many librarians have begun to promote open access publishing, inviting professors to retain their copyrights and initiating institutional repositories to retain access to the research created by their own researchers.

Have you been involved in the open access movement?  How?  

Do you publish in open-access journals?  Why?

Have you negotiated your copyright with publishers?  How did that go?

Below is a Wordle image highlighting the words used in this post.

Need a Shorter URL?

 For so many, this is old information, but it still comes in handy on occasion.

Do you ever cringe at seeing interminable website addresses (URLs)?  If you ever need to shorten up a URL, just go to Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/.  It will assign a shortened website for you that you can share more easily with others.  You do not even need to sign in or pay for this service.  By the way, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. 

How have you found the Tiny URL to be helpful?  When do you use it?  Have you ever found it problematic?

I have seen instruction librarians stick a tiny URL to the back of their business cards that they then hand out to their classes, especially if they have created a specific resources (pathfinder or Libguide) page for that particular class.  It diminishes the amount of confusion for students, and they can find the page again later--as long as they don't lose the business card, I suppose.  : )

Spanish Resources and Declassified Documents

Today I taught a Spanish 3381 class, which was a welcome opportunity to practice my Spanish-speaking skills.  The instructor asked that I show students how to find resources that will help them with their assignment.  Students need to write a paper and give an oral presentation on a Latin American country, focusing on a specific current event (last 50 years more or less).  Additionally, students are encouraged to search out declassified documents to see, as much as possible, the United States involvement in some of these events.  Of course, they are also asked to look for sources in Spanish that will help them understand their topic, such as the Dirty War in Argentina, Pinochet's government in Chile, the overthrow of Arbenz's government in Guatemala, or Madero's in Mexico.

Fortunately, one of my colleagues had taught this class five years ago and had a handout with a list of resources to get me started.  Database subscriptions change over time at academic institutions, and ours is not exception.  The part that worried me the most was finding declassified government documents.  In a casual encounter with the instructor last week, she indicated that Georgetown University had made resources available for researchers to find declassified documents.  When I looked at their site, I found that they do have databases for searching these documents; however, they required a login and password.  Again, a colleague of mine who is the government documents librarians really helped quite a bit in pointing me in the right direction.  Her efforts helped me improve upon the resources my first colleague shared with me, and the results can be found on this Declassified Documents page.

To see all my resources for this class, go to the Spanish 3381 site I created.  Here is the Tiny URL for the site: http://tinyurl.com/4sh9ywd.

Si quieres encontrar documentos desclasificados, utilice al siguiente sitio: Declassified Documents.  Claro, la mayoria de los documentos que se encuentran en los sitios del gobierno de los Estados Unidos de America son en ingles.  Si necesitas una traduccion de la pagina <<Declassified Documents>> dimelo.  Tratare' de ayudarte.

Origin of the Term "Call Numbers"

My supervisor received the following question from someone who has recently taken a position as a media specialist at a local elementary school and forwarded the question to me and my colleagues:

Somewhere I was reading about the origin of the phrase "Call Numbers".  I didn't know if the idea of a librarian "calling" out for books in closed stacks was a real story or not.  But if it is, it may help the students grasp the idea of call numbers a little better.

This seemed like quite an interesting question, so I Googled it, Asked Jeeves (okay just went to Ask.com), searched in the Oxford Reference Online, and looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica.  None of them mentioned anything about the origin of the term "call numbers."  Many results provided explanations on using call numbers to find books.  "Origin of call numbers" returned lots of results that had nothing to do with libraries. 

On a whim I thought to look in the index of Arlene G. Taylor's Introduction to Cataloging and Classification, Tenth Edition.  It referred me to page 528, where it included the following definition:

"Call number: A notation on an information package that matches the same notation in the surrogate/metadata record and is used to identify and locate a particular item; it often consists of a classification notation and a cutter number, and it may also include a work mark and/or a date.  It is the number used to 'call' for an item in a closed stack library--thus the source of the name 'call number.'  See also Cutter number; Work mark."

Bingo!  Eureka!  Ah hah!

I just love it.  Here's a time when the print source bested the online sources.  Of course it makes sense in retrospect that a book about cataloging and classification, which happens to be intended for library science students, would have such an answer.  Gotta love it.

If you are looking for ideas to teach students about Library of Congress call numbers, consider showing them the  following page on call numbers from our SearchPath Tutorial.  On the possible chance that you might be interested, here's a tutorial designed and hosted by the University of Pittsburgh on learning how to use LC call numbers, including an interactive component that allows users to put call numbers in their proper order.  The creators explain how others can link or use this tutorial for themselves. This could definitely be used in classrooms with computers. 

Though I have not checked it out yet, chances are that there is a game/tutorial freely available online that lets people practice putting Dewey call numbers in order.  This would be good for middle and high school students.

Here's a brief visual explanation from the University of Maryland's site "Finding Library Items Using Call Numbers."

Multimedia Tutorials with Adobe Presenter

Today I received word that an article I helped to co-author has been published.  InformaWorld's Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning published "Staying on Top of Your Game and Scoring Big with Adobe Presenter Multimedia Tutorials."  Adobe Presenter works with Microsoft PowerPoint and allows users to record and edit audio on each slide of a presentation.

Take a look at it and let me know what you think.

Cool YouTube Video on Visual Data/Statistics

"Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four"


This short video by Hans Rosling rocks! Statistics can be dull, cumbersome, and complex, but he succeeds in making them interesting, relatively simple, and relevant.  Indeed, he infuses a large dosage of hope regarding the future of our world with his concluding remarks.

Information literacy involves knowing when you need information, knowing how to access it, and applying the information ethically and effectively.  Sometimes we need statistics.  Each country gathers demographic data differently.  In a recent trip to Canada I learned that Canadian statistics can be aggravating to find and interpret.  In fact, one individual lamented that some of the census data did not continue from one iteration to another.  They changed the questions, so graduate students looking for longitudinal information in a particular area could not be extracted.

My sense is that U.S. statistics may include some of these same frustrating flaws as far as research goes.  In case you may be interested in finding U.S. statistics, take a look at our resource page.  Find links to the Census Bureau, FedStats, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics includes the Occupational Outlook Handbook and a site with career information for high school students.  I have always like the Statistical Abstract of the United States when looking for quick statistics.

Follow Up on Native American Research Post

In my searching for Shoshone/Bannock tribal treaties, I discovered another resource worth mentioning. Handbook of North American Indians published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is a bit dated, but still contains lots of information worth looking at with regards to the North American Indians.

This twelve-volume title dedicates a volume to each major region. Volume 11 highlights the Great Basin Indians, which includes the Shoshone/Bannock tribes. Chapters focus on the prehistory, history, ethnology, and special topics of individual areas within the region. Black and white photographs show art, tools, and contemporary individuals. For example, photos include bows, arrows, cradleboards, salmon-skin bags, woven carrying bags, and historical figures, as well as winter and summer dwellings.

The chapter titled "Northern Shoshone and Bannock" provides 29 pages of details about their language, environment, external relations, territory, population, culture, and history. A short history talks about their prehistory, but another chapter goes into greater detail where that is concerned. Multiple authors collaborated to write each chapter, and they include descriptions of their sources with author and date details. The full bibliography appears at the end of each volume, as well as a detailed index and a list of illustrations.

Shoshone Indians (1871). Photo by William H. Jackson. Courtesy of National Park Service.

Finding Native American/Indian Treaties

Last week I presented to my colleagues some updates to the Resources by Subject: Political Science page. In that presentation I pointed out one of our resources Public Documents Masterfile, which can aid researchers in finding government documents. Essentially, it serves as an index of other indexes. Therefore, this database does not provide full-text access, but it refers you to other sources, when can then refer you to the actual items with the full-text documents. Welcome to the world of government and legal research.

As an example, I showed how to find treaties between the U.S. government and the Shoshone/Bannock Tribes. A search for Shoshone Treaty brings back these results:

Selecting the first option with four records bring up this
"page:


Copying and pasting these titles into our catalog will help you find where they are located in our Library.  Actually, the following title Descriptive Catalog of the Government Publications of the United States will return a negative search, because the physical volume in question spell catalog like this: catalogue.  Whenever a title search does not work for me, my next step is to conduct an author search, which happens to be Poore, Benjamin Perley: .

The author search worked, and I found a call number but could not locate it on the shelf, so our government documents librarian helped me find it.  The numbers after the colon "963" and "991" seemed to refer to page numbers.  Nothing on page 963 seemed to refer to the Shoshone Indians, but there was something on page 991:

Report on the Shoshone and Bannock Indians.  See Columbus Delano.  Jan.22, 1874.  House Ex.Docs., No.61, 43d Cong.,1st sess., Vol.IX  2pp.  Transmitting information in regard to articles of convention concluded with the chiefs and headmen of the Shoshone and Bannock Indians for relinquishment of a portion of their reservation in Wyoming Territory.

Then my government documents colleague directed me to the CIS US Serial Set Index: 35th-45th Congresses 1857-1879 (Part II). Part II are "Finding Lists," so if you know what you want, that's the volume you need. If you are looking for documents according to their subject take a look at the two subject indexes on those sessions of congress.

Now we looked up the 43rd Congress, 1st session, which we found on page 1540. (Incidentally, this volume started on page 1293.) We found the title of House Executive Document 61: "Articles of convention with Shoshone and Bannock Indians for relinquishment of portion of their reservation in Wyoming Territory. Yes, we already had that information, so the most important thing at this point was the Volume and Serial numbers for the Serial Set. These were Vol. 9 Serial 1607.

We hiked up to the third floor, and, of course, the government documents librarian knows where the Serial Set is located, so I just followed. It turns out that we lack Serial number 1607. 1606 and 1608 sat on the shelf, but no 1607; however, someone had photocopied House Executive document 102, inserted it between a hard cover, and placed it on the shelf. This one did not relate directly to the Shoshone Bannock Tribes, but it did relate to Idaho: "Reservation for Indians of Colville agency, and for Coeur d'Alene Indians, of Territory of Idaho.

Since we could not locate it on the shelves, we went to the microfiche cabinets and found the microfiche that had Serial 1607, which included H.Ex.Doc.61. Today I went and refreshed my memory on using the microfiche and microfilm readers, scanned a copy of the two-page document. On one of my Google Sites pages it is the pdf document titled Shoshone Treaty.

Faster Way to Locate Native American/Indian Treaties

Yes, it does not have to take you this long to locate these treaties. Oklahoma State University has digitized many, if not all, of the treaties between the U.S. federal government and the sovereign tribes. Make sure to search Kappler's Indian Affairs:
.

Our Library does have a print copy of Kappler's Indian Affairs. Volume II on Laws and Treaties is where you would look to find the treaties. The index at the back points to the pages necessary for the appropriate tribal treaty in question. See pages 694, 848-51,859, and 1020 for treaties that mention the Shoshoni or Shoshone/Bannock Tribes. A look at our copy will show that these pages have been frequently looked at, since these are the nearest tribes to Pocatello, where Idaho State University resides.

Chief Pokatello helped negotiate the 1863 treaty; hence the name of the city here. The Shoshone/Bannock tribes live on the Fort Hall reservation.

Thank you, Oklahoma State University. Digital access takes much less time than hunting down the print copy.

Reading the Newspaper

Sometimes the newspaper can reveal some good websites worth using. Over the years I have discovered a number of good sites this way. Typically, I bookmark them within my Delicious account: delicious.com/sjardine.

Today I discovered SkillsUSA at www.skillsusa.org. A local Pocatello automotive teacher, Roy Angle, in the public school system recently earned the designation of first runner up for his work as SkillsUSA advisor for Region 5 (an area that includes much of the western U.S.). The Idaho State Journal's Jimmy Hancock describes the organization: "SkillsUSA is a partnership of students, teachers and industry working together to ensure America has a skilled work force." Idaho's School District 25 chose Angle as their Teacher of the Year.

Teaching Students with Learning Disabilities in the Information Literacy Classroom

Ted Chodock and Elizabeth Dolinger's article "Applying Universal Design to Information Literacy: Teaching Students Who Learn Differently at Landmark College" discusses some ideas for helping students with AD/HD, dyslexia, and other learning disabilities. The define their terms upfront and explain how Universal Design (UD) can apply both to architecture and the classroom. To them active-learning strategies facilitate UD in the classroom: "Instead of simply engaging students and breaking up lectures, active learning methods become a way to reach the variety of learners in the classroom" (30). This makes sense.

Of worthy mention, they explain and provide examples of nine Universal Design principles in their article. Let me highlight just a few. First, "equitable use" in the classroom could mean that a course guide be provided in an online format as well as in print. "The Web-based version allows students with dyslexia and others who learn better aurally to use a test-to-speech screen reader to access the content." It also allows visually impaired students to increase the font size (28).

"Principle 2: Flexibility in Use" encourages active-learning methods, which can help those with attention difficulties. Mix things up with group, demonstration, lecture, and independent activities. To get their attention, also try previewing and viewing an agenda periodically throughout the class, noting when certain objectives have been accomplished. Goals that correlate directly to an assignment give students more reason to engage (28-29).

Spelling search terms can also even things up for those with dyslexia, not to mention a large number of students who have always had a spell-checking function available to correct their mistakes. Along these lines, the authors suggest that handouts, printed or otherwise, be written in a sans serif font, such as Arial or Trebuchet, and that any writing on a blackboard or whiteboard be done with print letters. Cursive or fancy writing may be particularly difficult for those with dyslexia. Besides, the large majority of students will be able to interpret print letters more readily (28).

Finally, "Principle 4: Perceptible Information" deals with clear communication. They make some good points:

Two other applications of principle 4 are using few words in giving directions and presenting information in multiple formats. Just as including too many databases and search strategies can be counterproductive to memory, so can giving detailed instructions that assume a shared knowledge base. Instead, succinct instructions using fewer words provided in sequential order are more effective. Finally, examples of presenting material in multiple formats include using online video clips to illustrate concepts, emphasizing the increasing availability of audio and video content in databases and other electronic resources, and linking multimedia screencasts to Web-based course guides. (29)

It seems that academic librarians spend a lot of time adopting or looking into new technology. Understanding the why's and wherefore's can be useful, and this article begins to address some of these reasons. They also talk about why half to a third of an instruction session should be given for students to practice searching the resources just demonstrated. Students benefit from this opportunity to search, make mistakes, and ask for help from an expert (29).

Consider reading this article and coming back to discuss it here:

Chodock, Ted, and Elizabeth Dolinger. "Applying Universal Design to Information Literacy: Teaching Students Who Learn Differently at Landmark College." Reference & User Services Quarterly 49.1 (Fall 2009): 24-32. Print.

New Books in the Library

Most academic libraries buy books. Yes, they often buy lots and lots of books in order to support ongoing research. Depending on the discipline, some fields of study publish more books than others. For example, hundreds of titles get published in English, history, art, philosophy, political science, and so on. Generally speaking, the hard sciences, such as biology, medicine, engineering, mathematics, do not publish quite as many books. These disciplines tend to publish their research findings predominantly in scholarly and peer-reviewed journals.

In many cases, patrons of academic libraries can browse some of the new books in a reading room. (Admittedly, not all new books go onto the "New Books" shelf. Typically, the most attractive or eye-catching titles go on the "New Books" shelf.) Some professors like to view the recent acquisitions in the Library, especially if they have helped with the selection of the titles.


New books can also be browsed online in many library catalogs. Below is a link to a tutorial that shows how to browse new books with the Eli M. Oboler Library's catalog:
New Books in ISU's Oboler Library. Another link to this tutorial can be found on the Eli M. Oboler Library Tutorials site.

The tutorial suggests that students can browse new book titles to discover potential research projects. It seems that deciding on a topic remains one of the biggest problems students face in the research process. If they wait too long, then they will not have enough time to research the topic, they will not become as interested, and they final result may not be quite as polished.

On the other hand, browsing the new books might introduce them to a subject that piques their interest. If they go and check out a new book, then they may only need to go and find a few more sources, thus saving them time. This strategy could save them time, especially if they utilized the list of references (the bibliography) within the book. A simple title search could save time, where a keyword search might take a bit longer. Additionally, like I often express in teaching situations, if they find a "new" book they like, they can go to the shelf where that book will be located after it is no longer "new" and look around to see other books on that same topic, thus expediting the search process even further.

Finding Full-Text Access

Students often come to ask for assistance with their research at the reference desk. One student yesterday wanted to find access to articles within particular journal titles, so I showed him how to use the A-Z Journal List, which can sometimes be a bit cumbersome. As a result I thought it might be helpful for the student if I created a quick Jing tutorial. As it turned out, I ended up creating two tutorials, so I thought I would share.

The first one demonstrates how to use the A-Z Journal list. It also shows how to search within a publication inside the ProQuest Central database.

The second tutorial shows how to use the Resources by Subject pages. These pages point students to databases which will help them with their discipline-specific research.