As information professionals, engineering librarians have the primary responsibilities of providing access to engineering information resources and giving instruction in how to use these resources. In the case of undergraduate engineering students, this extends to building their information literacy skills, an important component in helping them…

This qualitative study examines current community college library practices in developmental education. Based on semistructured telephone interviews with 27 librarians across the United States, analysis of the results shows that there are librarians who proactively integrate basic library skills into developmental education and academic success…

Some faculty and administrators naively believe that undergraduates come to campus as information literate individuals since these students know how to use computers and the Internet. Yet, as librarians, they know that there is more to IL than surfing search engines, IMing, and word processing. So marketing IL becomes a very important task. This…

In order to improve library instruction and to produce data that shed light on the value of this core library service, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library conducted a formal assessment on its instruction program in 2004. A group of 688 users from 25 one-shot sessions was surveyed by a questionnaire four to eight weeks after…

Students have provided cheap successful labour for routine retrospective cataloguing projects. The current article examines a library project which went further, using university students with minimum training to catalogue its undergraduate stock from the book in hand to AACR2, level 2, allegedly to professional standard. The article discusses the…

Fullerton, California--College students use technology constantly. They text-message friends, compile playlists for their iPods, and are whizzes at updating their MySpace profiles. But when it comes to one kind of work they are required to do in college--namely, academic research--they can be inept. Too often, college officials say, students rely…

Twenty-one scholarly papers and fifteen abstracts comprise the content of the tenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Symposium, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The peer-reviewed proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of…

As part of the University of Rhode Island Libraries' "Comprehensive Plan for Information Literacy," a three-credit class in the skills and concepts of information literacy was first offered in the fall of 1999. More than 1,000 undergraduate students have taken the class since that time. A pre-test was given at the beginning of each semester,…

This study found that there were statistically significant differences in citation use and grades between students who took a library credit course and students who did not. The results of independent samples t-tests indicated that the student group that took a library credit course cited more scholarly resources, produced fewer incomplete…

About a decade ago, a team of librarians and technologists at the University of Texas at Austin began development on a Web-based tutorial for undergraduate students. The tutorial used a range of technologies--HTML, Flash, javascript--to create four modules that emphasized information literacy concepts by using a mix of text, images, interactive…

The current study sought to measure the influence of a one-hour library training/orientation session on college students' library use and library skill development. Data analysis revealed a statistically significant increase in student library use while there was no statistically significant increase in library skill development. Some issues,…

The importance of instruction in the use of books, bibliography, and library economy is recognized by institutions of higher education in the United States. In many of the universities, colleges, and normal schools of the country prescribed courses are given in the book arts and bibliography. To obtain statistical and other data relating to…

Since 2001, librarians at Oregon State University's Valley Library have been working to build a "teaching library" supported by a clearly articulated instruction program. From the start, we believed that we needed to assess the teaching library's impact, not only to determine the success or failure of our efforts but also to demonstrate…

The ability to access, evaluate and synthesise high-quality research material is the backbone of critical thinking in academic and professional contexts for Engineers and Industrial Designers. This is the premise upon which teaching and library staff developed Information Literacy (IL) components in Engineering & Industrial Design Practice--a…

Librarians are conducting instruction sessions outside the traditional classroom setting using online tutorials with increasing frequency. Online tutorials seem like an obvious solution to meet the growing need for instruction to users in a time when resources are shrinking. Can librarians effectively teach library skills using an online tutorial?…