Community colleges are institutions that provide access to higher education to anyone with a high school diploma or GED (Kim & Dolan, 2015). The student body is highly diverse and may not be prepared for academic coursework (Cohen et al., 2014). These challenges may be supplemented through embedding services directly into college courses. The…

Open educational resources (OER) provide college students with course materials on the first day of class, ensuring an equitable learning experience for all. The concept of OER has been around for almost 20 years, yet many faculty and librarians are just now becoming aware as more and more statewide initiatives are introduced. The adoption of OER…

In the book "Redesigning America's Community Colleges" (Bailey, Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015), the authors briefly noted the role that librarians might play in informing and supporting guided pathways reform. In this short essay, one of the book's authors joins with a librarian to provide updated and revised thoughts on the role of…

Despite demonstrated student benefits from Open Educational Resources (OER), especially those in community colleges, faculty adoption remains marginal. This study is framed by diffusion of innovations theory, which acknowledges that adoption of an innovation must exceed a tipping point to ensure enduring success. The study focuses on community…

This article discusses how following graduation, students often enter the job market unprepared to find, evaluate, and use information in the digital environment effectively. Essentially, there is a disparity between the skills students attain in college coursework, including information literacy (IL) skills, and those required in the workplace,…

The Library of Congress offers a wealth of primary source documents that can be integrated into the classroom to enhance critical thinking skills of students as they learn about historical and other related topics. Similarly, these materials can be promoted via individual libraries for their 24/7 access online. Understanding what primary source…

This article describes a strategy to integrate information literacy into the curriculum of a nursing program in a community college. The model is articulated in four explained phases: preparatory, planning, implementation, and evaluation. It describes a collaborative process encouraging librarians to work with nursing faculty, driving students to…

Being advocates, or evangelists, for certain tools is not a new idea for many librarians in terms of promoting our digital resources. However, what is new is our involvement in promoting digital technologies used for teaching and engagement to faculty and other college stakeholders. In addition, our role has expanded to working with those…

Skill and drill remediation in developmental reading courses do not prepare students for reading tasks in future college-level courses. When a skill and drill model is replaced with a model that utilizes contextualization, students engage in relevant activities with authentic texts to prepare students for college-level activities. The reading…

Collaboration among librarians and faculty when designing courses can offer a new model of embedded librarianship that allows better scalability and opportunities for more authentic assessment. This column looks at one example at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This article explores the role of the instruction librarian as an equal player in higher learning initiatives, and focuses on student motivation, information literacy, activity and assessment, and collaboration. Library literacy is a major component of student success in community colleges, but the role of the instruction librarian is often…

This article explains how the South Piedmont Community College librarians educated faculty members about how they guide student use of the library and how it is advantageous for them to require high-quality resources for student papers. As documented by observations at SPCC and in the library literature, students use the tools they know to find…

This article describes practical steps taken in the planning of an integrated information literacy instruction linked to a course assignment for community health majors at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. The library sessions integrated the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information…

The easy availability of Internet information has caused many to question the future of libraries. However, librarians, as experts of information science, are even more necessary to help students navigate the Internet. An embedded librarian provides assistance at the most critical point -- exactly when it is needed.

This paper examines the embedded librarian program and its impact on the information literacy skills of community college students at Queensborough Community College (QCC). It is a collaboration between an embedded librarian and an English instructor at QCC. The study participants are QCC students enrolled in seven sections of English 101 and…