Julie Edwards: Okay.
Julie Edwards: So I am. If you're ready, I'm going to go ahead and start letting people in and then and then i'll catch up with you later on this afternoon with the final numbers.
Julie Edwards: If you need anything for like a formal 10 year promotion packet, let me know, and i'll get you something on letterhead. So thank you. No problem. Okay, Thank you again for doing this.
Laura Saunders: I'm: so excited
Julie Edwards: It'll be great. Yeah, i'm excited. All right. Here we go.
Julie Edwards: Welcome, everybody. I see you all joining us. Feel free to
Julie Edwards: come on in. Get situated.
Julie Edwards: Hop over to the chat if you would like, and say, Hi, let us know where you're from. We do publish the Chat Transcript. Let me rewind that we publish the Chat Transcript because there is always a lot of great information that gets passed back and forth in there. So if you don't want to say hi in the chat, you don't have to, but
Julie Edwards: we would welcome anyone who would like to say, Hi. hey, Fort Worth.
Julie Edwards: It's like oh, someone's excited to be here in this Laura. Awesome.
Julie Edwards: fantastic.
Julie Edwards: Hey, South Carolina State University. Nice to see you.
Julie Edwards: hey? Texas and Louisiana Wisconsin! Now people are rolling in.
Julie Edwards: Hey, Canada. Hey, Casper Wyoming! I used to live in Riverton
Julie Edwards: fantastic. Hey! What's the
Julie Edwards: Georgia? Texas so nice to see everybody? Wow! Arkansas, Kalamazoo, Delaware, Puerto Rico. Hi! Thanks for joining us.
Julie Edwards: I love seeing our international Librarians when I was still working in libraries. International librarianship was my jam. So I love seeing people join us from all over the world.
Julie Edwards: hey? From Buckinghamshire in the Uk. Well, this is great, so nice to see so many of you. Thanks for joining us. So we are right at the top of the hour here in mountain time we'll go ahead and get started. I'm. Julie Edwards and i'm a librarian and instructional designer with Niche Academy. Welcome to this webinar leading the way for information, literacy, planning, promotion, and policy. I am so thrilled to have you all with us here today. I always
Julie Edwards: love picking these Webinars the things that I wish I had when I was a practicing librarian. So this is one of those for sure, so happy to see you all here with us today. I'm going to do a little bit of our standard housekeeping, and then we'll go ahead and get started.
Julie Edwards: Let me start by introducing Niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning platform to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measure learner's success
Julie Edwards: mit ctl. And so our software is the perfect tool for academic libraries looking to increase your e-resource, usage, deliver information, literacy, instruction and measure student success, and provide training for patrons and staff, including your student employees, 2.
Julie Edwards: If you're interested in finding out more about our e-learning solution chatting with the member of our team hearing what other libraries have to say, I will drop a link in the chat to our website, so you can learn a little bit more about us
Julie Edwards: about the Webinar today. We are recording this, and I will make the recording the slides and the chat and audio transcripts available to everyone who is registered. After the presentation you'll get a direct email from me in a few days with all of that. So you can just sit back and absorb the excellent material today.
If you want. You can turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen in zoom.
Julie Edwards: feel free to chat with each other in the chat box. There's always a lot of great information that you
Julie Edwards: that happens when librarians get together. But if you have a question for the presenter, please, you'd use the Q a. Box in zoom, because stuff does tend to get lost in the chat. There are 200 of us on counting in this webinar right now, and so If something pops in the chat, I may miss it. If you put it in the question and answer box, I'll keep an eye on it, and do my best to moderate the questions at the end of the Webinar.
Julie Edwards: So this Webinar series is a part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together and providing, continuing education in the library world. I'm so happy that you've joined us all. We have a lot more free webinars coming up, including Webinars specifically for Academic librarians. I'll drop a link to our blog in the chat also, so you can see that as well.
Julie Edwards: So, without further ado, our present presenter today is Laura Saunders. Laura is a professor at Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, and the 2,019 recipient of Simmons University's prov award for excellence in graduate teaching.
Julie Edwards: Her teaching and research focus on the areas of information literacy, including miss and disinformation reference services and academic libraries. She also teaches a course on Intellectual freedom and censorship
Julie Edwards: for most recent books include reference and information services and introduction. Sixth edition, which was co-edited with Melissa Wong and the open access. Textbook instruction and libraries and information settings and introduction also co-authored with Melissa Wong she has had articles appear in a variety of journals, including college and research libraries, the Journal of Academic librarianship and communications and Information literacy.
Laura is presented for us before she is excellent. We are so happy to have her back, and I will turn the Webinar over to her.
Laura Saunders: Thank you so much, Julie, and thank you all for joining me. It's so exciting to see so many people here. So, as Julie said, my name is Laura Saunders, and i'm gonna be talking today about leading the way for information, literacy, planning, promotion and policy, and there will definitely be time for questions and answers and and sort of general discussion at the end. I
Laura Saunders: We'll try to keep a little bit of an eye on the chat as we go, in case people have questions that you know are kind of relevant to certain points of the presentation as well.
Laura Saunders: So let's go ahead and get started. So the outcomes for today. I
Laura Saunders: intend that at the end of the session we'll all be able to identify the role of information, literacy and the role it can play in an undergraduate curriculum. We can discuss methods for planning and promoting an information literacy program and examine policies and policy development
Laura Saunders: before we go too much further. I just kind of wanted to get our our juices flowing a little bit and do a little waterfall, which is just to ask everybody to put into the chat any ideas you have for opportunities
Laura Saunders: or challenges that you see for Il programs in your you know your own institution. So i'm gonna just give us, you know, 15 or 20 s here, and you can just put that in the chat, and maybe label it if you see it as an opportunity or a challenge, or maybe both.
Laura Saunders: And then we can hopefully talk about those a little bit as we go. all right, and I see some things coming in convincing faculty. It's worth time again. Getting faculty involved. AI: yeah, that's that's a big deal right now. Administrative support and resources, lack of interest from students faculty involvement.
Laura Saunders: admin support. information, overload a hi. Students find it boring. Unfortunately they often do. But here we go, an opportunity as well assessing the discrepancy between requested learning outcomes versus what is actually performed. Yes, I would. I would agree that can be doing that work can actually open up some new opportunities.
Laura Saunders: English and composition classes are required to come that can be an opportunity absolutely competing for time.
Laura Saunders: The prevalence of the one-shot model
Laura Saunders: definitely there's a lot of challenge around faculty and student interest as well as just I can see resource constraints, including you know resources in terms of time, in terms of staff.
Laura Saunders: And then, though again, some some opportunities here in terms of strategic plans, faculty, development, offices, genet requirements, etc. great. So thank you for all of that. I just kind of want to get some sense of where people are coming from.
Laura Saunders: and I do think we'll be talking about some of these things, both the opportunities and the challenges as we go. So in terms of opportunities. These are a couple of things that I had identified, and one is miss and disinformation, and maybe that shouldn't be the first thing up here. But it is the thing that is on my mind a lot lately, probably just because it's one of my you know areas of focus and areas of research. But I do think that
Laura Saunders: it opens up an opportunity for us, because a lot of people are recognizing the relevance now of news and other literacies in terms of
being a way to combat miss and disinformation, and I would say to an extent, there's increased attention from faculty to these areas that I don't necessarily just mean missing disinformation. But information literacy in general. So the more recent Ithaca SNR reports, if you've been following their faculty surveys that they do every 2 or 3 years faculty are starting to put some
Laura Saunders: attention to the ways in which librarians support their students research, and this instruction they provide There's also widespread respect for librarians. Of course, as we know that Respect doesn't always translate into class time, but I think that there is something to build on there.
It's worth noting that information. Literacy is still included in a lot of accreditation standards, and that also opens up some opportunities for us. And I think the expansion into online teaching that we've seen, especially since the Covid pandemic
Laura Saunders: opens up some opportunities in terms of giving us a new and other ways of connecting with people and getting into classrooms, although I would acknowledge that's definitely also a challenge as well, because it just means different work, flows and and more work in in different areas.
Laura Saunders: But, as I mentioned you. Know we do have a little bit more attention from the faculty in recent years. So this is just a little chart from the Ithaca SNR the 2021 ithica SNR faculty survey.
Laura Saunders: and I realized it might be a little bit hard to see on the slide. As Julie said, You will get copies of these slides later. But this top part of the chart is faculty. Our faculty responses to the the statement that improving migrants undergraduate students research skills related to locating and evaluating scholarly information is an important educational goal, and you can see that it was close to 80% of science faculty agreed with that question.
Social sciences faculty were also very high up there and then.
Laura Saunders: This second statement was my undergraduate. Students have core skills related to locating and evaluating scholarly information, and you can see around half or more than half of the faculty agreed with that statement. So again I do see these as being areas of opportunity when faculty are acknowledging that there are that this is something that's important to them, and that it's a place where their students need some help
Laura Saunders: in terms of the challenges that we face, though in information, literacy, instruction, as we saw in the waterfall, responses being dependent on faculty is definitely a challenge. Not that working with faculty can't be wonderful in lots of ways, but it is absolutely true that there is often a lack of knowledge and understanding of what librarians do, and even of what information literacy is, and how it can be addressed.
Laura Saunders: and in what I mean by that in particular, is not that the faculty don't understand what information literacy is at least sort of abstractly, and not that they don't know what librarians do, but they often don't really understand the extent to which we can come into their classes, and really
integrate into their sessions and into their courses, and really support very specific learning outcomes. So they often approach this as either
Laura Saunders: a ha asking us to do really general orientations that often Don't really meet students needs at the moment, or giving very narrow support to a specific assignment that sometimes students then find difficult to transfer to other areas. So I think
Laura Saunders: it's definitely a challenge to just kind of get faculty to understand the breath of our expertise and the way that we can be integrated into their classrooms.
And then again, as we saw on the waterfall the limit of the one-shot session. Knowing that we're going to see this particular group of students only once and often for as little as 45 min
Laura Saunders: it it really limits how much we can do. And of course, the other problem with that is, it may be the only time we're going to see this particular group of students together, but any one of these individuals may have been in other one shot sessions where they've heard similar material, and that can lead to them, feeling sort of uninterested and disengaged.
Laura Saunders: And then again, those resource constraints in terms of our time, our lack of staff, our lack of budget. Now I put also an opportunity here, and what I mean by that is not that the resource constraints on the library are an opportunity, but just the fact that
Laura Saunders: the resource constraints that are being felt by the faculty could in some way open up apple opportunities for the librarians.
because, as we faculty are also kind of facing these constraints, of having in a lot of cases fewer staff to support our instructional design, and and things like that, you know.
Laura Saunders: feeling less, time always being stretched for time in terms of developing our courses. It may be that we are going to be more open to the idea of having that librarian support that we were maybe not as open to in the past.
Laura Saunders: So, just using those opportunities and challenges as a little bit of a framework for thinking about how we approach our Il design.
Laura Saunders: So let's talk a little bit about planning for informational literacy programs.
Laura Saunders: So I think the first thing we want to do is just to engage in some resource analysis. So, like I said, we, we certainly understand that we're pretty much all under some sort of resource constraints right now. So but what we want to do is, look at what we have, and think about what we can do with what we have at the moment.
So the first thing is really thinking about our staff and their specialties and expertise.
Laura Saunders: And of course, you know, all of our staff are gonna be information experts. They're gonna have a lot of expertise in terms of you know database searching and metadata, and also often subject expertise, especially if they're liaison librarians. But i'm also thinking about the expertise that some of our staff may have in areas of inst instructional design, educational technology and things like that, so that we can really build on the strengths that already exist on our staff.
Laura Saunders: Certainly thinking about the time that we have.
Laura Saunders: and you know it. And this may also be thinking about things like, how many staff do we have available to deploy for instruction? What percentage of their time do they actually spend on instruction, and and how much
of their time, maybe, do we expect them to be spending on instruction, and even thinking about things like the faculty, the librarian to student ratio or librarian to course ratio. Maybe if we want to think about things like the Gen. LED courses where this kind of instruction might be
Laura Saunders: sort of naturally embedded. And then what kinds of technology do we have available to us? You know, some of us may have access to some really nice instructional design and educational technology materials, some really fancy, like video recording and editing. At 1 point it's on my campus at Simmons. We actually had a really nice recording studio
Laura Saunders: with some pretty fancy equipment and things like that. So we want to think about. What do we have? But even if we don't have some of that stuff at our fingertips.
There's a lot of free resources out there that can also be really just a serviceable. So we want to think about what we have available to us, and then we need to think about. How do we want to allocate those resources and some of the things we might want to think about are.
Laura Saunders: to what extent do we want our librarians engaging in live instruction sessions, so those like in class, whether it might be face to face or online synchronously, but being present in class again often for those one shot sessions, but
Laura Saunders: really being there to kind of deliver that real time, instruction and support. And to what extent, maybe, do we want to focus on live sessions, but that are more focused on train? The trainer. So, in in other words, somebody put into the waterfall and the chat. That faculty development offices can be an area of opportunity.
and I have certainly found that that sometimes working with them to provide training to the faculty in terms of how they can integrate and address information, literacy, instruction, and their sessions can be really useful, and can help to
Laura Saunders: allay some of the pressure that is on us to try and get into so many classes. So the library director at Simmons University, and I have been visiting
a course institute every summer to train faculty in one of the general education courses where information literacy is actually a learning outcome, so that they can integrate that into their classes. But to what extent, maybe, do we want to
Laura Saunders: develop asynchronous resources? Whether these might be video lectures, tutorials, lib guides, and things like that.
Laura Saunders: And then we want to think about how much time do we have to devote to outreach? Since again. We're often dependent on those faculty invitations to to get into classes.
I would also encourage us, and I realized, I just said, the time is often a constraint, but to the extent possible to engage in some environmental scanning. And I would say, to try and do this
both locally and more broadly, so it. It can certainly be helpful to look and see what's happening in the broader fields of higher education and Academic librarianship. So, for instance.
AI and the sort of Jack Chat Gpt. Models and things like that are definitely a hot trend right now, and knowing that that's a trend, and that it's something that our faculty are often right now really concerned with
Laura Saunders: that can help provide us with an opportunity of. We know faculty are concerned with this. How can we sort of use that as a hook to open up a conversation with them.
Laura Saunders: But we also want to look at what's happening locally. So are there new initiatives happening, new programs being launched, things like that that might again open up some opportunities in terms of you know. We went through a big general education, redesign a few years back, and and it was an opportunity to talk about information, literacy, outcomes, and where they belonged.
Laura Saunders: And then I would also suggest the curriculum mapping can be a useful way of engaging in some planning for in
Laura Saunders: information literacy programs. So I I imagine many or maybe even all of you are familiar with curriculum mapping, but I just want to kind of go through it relatively quickly. So with curriculum mapping, what we usually do
Laura Saunders: is take either our own program of information, literacy courses, or probably more
Laura Saunders: more often we'll take the existing courses in a curriculum, so either the general education, curriculum, or the majors, especially the majors, maybe in the departments that we liaise to, and what we'll do is try to map out
Laura Saunders: where there are opportunities for library support. So, for instance, we can look to see, where are there outcomes that that are relevant to information, literacy, or where are their assignments? That sort of implicitly include those kinds of outcomes
Laura Saunders: or or assignments that you know
Laura Saunders: clearly need students to engage in the kinds of research and resource evaluation that that we have expertise in, so we'll look for those opportunities and look to see where there are places in the curriculum that align with our strengths.
Laura Saunders: and then we can think about? Where do we already have connections, for instance, where we may be already engaged, or have faculty, who might be really receptive to this, so that we can start thinking about where we want to focus our efforts to begin with, with the idea that hopefully it will snowball out after that.
Laura Saunders: So often when we're doing curriculum mapping, we lay this out in a sort of grid. And so here's an example. This actually comes from a lib guide of library
Laura Saunders: resources. I believe it's from University of Texas. Now, now, I'm forgetting. But it is. I do cite it in the resources at the end of the slides. And so basically. This is a curriculum map for a co culinary science department that has a major in chocolate or cogo.
And so what you see here are 3 of the courses that are required in that, Major. So you have introduction to chocolate economics of chocolate chocolate as a cure, and I mean, obviously I don't expect you to be able to see or read all of these descriptions. But this is more about the way that we might lay out a curriculum map, so we would list the courses.
and we would look at the course descriptions, and then that would help us to think about where we could address learning outcomes and activities. So in this particular
Laura Saunders: set of courses we can see, for instance, that there is some focus on the science and theory of chocolate which you know might lead to thinking about. Where are they? Where would students find that science and theory? Especially because we can see here They're required to write a 5 page paper that has to include a bibliography. So this is one course where we could probably clearly see an opportunity for some library support another one. Another example is in the second course, where there is
a reference to the economics specific to cocoa. And so again, what we could do is. Take those
Laura Saunders: descriptions and start thinking about. Where could we fit in? And we could add things like the kinds of skills that we might expect students to need in order to write those 5 page papers, or do research about the economics of chocolate, and so on.
Laura Saunders: and then chart out the kinds of activities that we might that we might offer in a library instruction class. So, for instance, having students complete for research modules with some corresponding exercises or doing it in class activity.
Laura Saunders: giving students practice on finding books, etc. So this is just a sample of how we could develop a curriculum map that would help us to see where we could offer support in a particular program, and then using that to open up a conversation with the faculty, and to come to them with specific suggestions.
because again, when faculty are also
Laura Saunders: pressed for time. they often have a hard time
Laura Saunders: just even imagining. Where should they bring the librarians in, and so either they don't do it at all, or they fall back on. You know the the sort of regular. Just do your thing and and show them how to use the databases. So if we can come with some specific ideas and say, okay, I see in this class you're addressing. This
students need to know how to do. X Y. And Z. Here's what I can do to help teach them that
Laura Saunders: that's gonna take some of the burden basically off the faculty of trying to think about where the library fits in
Laura Saunders: another strategy that I suggest in terms of planning is to get a seat at the table. So, in other words.
you know, as I said, we're looking around at our environment. We're doing some environmental scanning, and part of what we're likely to be seeing is things like decisions being made about adding programs, adding minors, maybe even just adding classes, changing up the curriculum in certain ways, as well as decisions about how to allocate resources and things like that. And all of these, of course.
can impact the library in lots of different ways, you know.
Laura Saunders: adding a new program, or bringing in a much larger number of students, perhaps, than than we have in the past. Could it affect our subscriptions and things like that. But of course, what we're interested in here today is, how could this affect our information? Literacy programs?
Laura Saunders: And as I mentioned
Laura Saunders: as an example, a a few years ago at Simmons we did do a a pretty major revamp to our general education curriculum, and we went from a model that, I would say, was a little bit more like a distributive model where it was kind of, you know. Take a class that that touches on quantitative literacy, and you have to take a class that does writing and etc., to something that was much more integrated. And the first class in in this sort of new
Laura Saunders: integrated curriculum was Really, it's called the at Boston Class, and what it is. Faculty can propose a class on pretty much any topic in there, you know. So typically it's going to be within their field that uses Boston as some sort of touching point, or laboratory, or etc. So, for instance, you might have
Laura Saunders: classes on art. In Boston. There were classes that looked at like food and food availability, and they did food, field trips to various neighborhoods and looked at grocery stores and things like that. But my point is
Laura Saunders: that in one of the outcomes for this particular course was related to information, literacy, and because I and the library director were in some of the meetings where this
Laura Saunders: the curriculum was being discussed, and we suggested information, literacy, and how it might be relevant to this program. I think that was part of the reason that those outcomes were able to
Laura Saunders: be integrated into that into that program which then again open the door for the librarian and I to do some training, and to really be more integrated into the the courses as well. Now.
Laura Saunders: I say, get a seat at the table, but I also realized that we're not always in a position to just go and grab a seat right? I mean Again, we're often, you know, really dependent on invitations
Laura Saunders: to, you know, be part of any of the groups that might be making these sorts of decisions, and even If the library has some sort of seat at the table, it may not be us the instruction librarians. So another possibility. If we can't get a seat at the table ourselves is to build our own table.
Laura Saunders: And what I mean by that is something that I bet many of you are already doing, which is to create an advisory board and really
Laura Saunders: fill that advisory board with people who are gonna be influential with faculty, who are already champions of the library with, you know, other administrators who might have some some really good
Laura Saunders: connections and influence. You know people from that Faculty Development Center people from the registrar's office.
whoever it might be, and you know, see if you can get them to be involved in a lot of cases. People are more than happy to be on an advisory board, especially if it only means, you know, a couple of meetings a year, but at least it's an opportunity for you to have a group of people who are ready and willing to listen to what's happening in the library, to listen to some ideas who might be able to bring those ideas back to the big table, where where they already have a seat.
Laura Saunders: and and it's a good way to kind of. Also get feedback on things that that you might be thinking about, and related to getting a seat at the table and and having those voices there, having those people there.
Laura Saunders: you know. Make sure that your documents are getting out to the right stakeholders. So whether these are strategic plans, annual reports, and things like that, you can use the advisory board as one way to push those out.
Laura Saunders: and I do see that there's a question in the chat about working off the syllabus for curriculum mapping absolutely that can be. The syllabus gives you a lot more information typically, at least. Then the the basic course, descriptions and the catalogs. I think that's a great way to do curriculum mapping.
Laura Saunders: All right. So let's talk a little bit about how to promote our information like literacy programs. Just a few ideas here. Of course we have to engage in outreach, and as we sort of mentioned at the top of the program engaging in outreach really can be a challenge when we're already feeling kind of stretched and short staffed, and so on.
Laura Saunders: But there are a few things that we can do that might help with outreach, and the first is always to go back to those key faculty who are already using your services, or who seem receptive to the idea, and and engage with them as much as possible, and
Laura Saunders: in list to them and helping you to reach other faculty. You also want to think about what's your area of focus or your areas of focus. You know. What is it that you want to do? Is it that you really want to build out
Laura Saunders: a program for general education. Is it that you want to build a more scaffolded program through a department or a major? Do you want to build up a train? The trainer program. Think about what it is that you want to focus on right now, so that you can put your energy not just into building that program, but also into doing the outreach necessary for it.
Laura Saunders: As you think about your focus, You're also thinking about your audience. And so you really need to think about
Laura Saunders: Who cares about what it is that we're doing? What do they care about in relation to that? How do we know that that's what they care about?
Laura Saunders: And in some cases we may have to ask them and and engage with them. But we really want to understand our audience, and in this case the audience is often the faculty
Laura Saunders: to think about
Laura Saunders: what it is that they are interested in, so that we can tailor our messages to them. And I know again. I think this is something that we talk about quite often that you know we can't do one size fits all marketing and stuff like that, but this is really brought home to me in the last year or so, where I happen to be on on the faculty, Senate.
and
Laura Saunders: you know, so faculty, Senate. Of course it's made up of faculty from all across departments, and it was really interesting to just observe the ways in which
they talk to each other.
Laura Saunders: and the ways in which they really are so set in their sort of disciplinary, not just their disciplinary perspectives, but their disciplinary cultures in a lot of ways, so that I actually heard people say things like, let me explain to you how mathematicians think, and you know the the message, at least to me seem to be.
Laura Saunders: You have to. You have to talk to me in this way, or I'm not going to respond, or i'm not going to understand, or or something like that, or I remember
Laura Saunders: reaching out to someone one day and saying, You know, sharing a spreadsheet and kind of saying what if we organized some information this way, and the person wrote back to me and said something like, You know, I really prefer to talk in stories rather than in data.
Laura Saunders: And so it was. Experiences like that. That really made me realize that
Laura Saunders: i'm the one who has to be flexible here, I guess right, and that, you know, there are certainly faculty who are just who are just really coming from a very particular culture.
Laura Saunders: And so we want to think about what kinds of messages are going to resonate with them. So I want to give a couple of examples. These are: These are kind of silly, straightforward examples. But just as a, for instance, for reaching out to different kinds of of faculty cultures. So, for instance, imagine that we did want to use that
Laura Saunders: artificial intelligence, chat, gpt kind of hook to to talk to faculty, so I could imagine, you know, if we were talking to some of the harder science faculty. Math. You know natural sciences something like that.
Laura Saunders: maybe bringing some stats to them right. So this is Chat gpt user Stats, and it compares how long it took Chat Gpt to get to 1 million users compared to Facebook, Instagram Spotify, Netflix, etc. So if we wanted to kind of get faculty thinking about yeah, it's pretty likely that your students
Laura Saunders: are at least familiar with Chat Gpt. These kinds of statistics might catch their eye, or you know, similarly giving them
Laura Saunders: this chart from intelligence.com that asks students. How often have they used Chat Gpt to help them complete written assignments, and we can see that one
Laura Saunders: 75 of, or I'm. Sorry. About
Laura Saunders: 35 or 40% of the students said that they used
Laura Saunders: use chat, gpt, 25 or 50 of the time. So again, these kinds of statistics might speak to certain faculty as opposed to. If we're talking to Faculty, who really want to hear a story
Laura Saunders: and again, forgive me. I am not a graphic artist or anything like that. But I just kind of came up with this silly little cartoon of it's one am. Do you know who's doing your students homework. And you know you've got the student playing video games and eating pizza while Chat Gpt is working on its own on the computer.
Laura Saunders: So these are just some ideas.
Laura Saunders: and i'm gonna i'm gonna hold off on the questions right now, just because I can see that there are a little bit longer questions, and and there's definitely going to be time at the end. So I definitely will come back to those. But these are just some examples of different ways that we might try to catch faculty with attention.
Laura Saunders: using an outreach method that might resonate with them.
Laura Saunders: Okay? And then finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about
Laura Saunders: information, literacy, policies, or instruction policies.
Laura Saunders: And I wanted to start actually by just asking how many people actually have. I say formalized. But how many people actually have any sort of information, literacy, policy
Laura Saunders: for what you do in your particular library? So policies around booking classes around
how classes are offered any of that kind of stuff. So
Laura Saunders: if you go to menti.com m, e n t, i.com
Laura Saunders: and use this code that you see at the top of the slide it's 5 3 1 8 4 0 5, one.
Laura Saunders: and again i'm gonna just give us like.
Laura Saunders: you know, 35 40 s to to log in there, and and just let us know if you have a formalized information literacy policy. I just like to get a kind of sense of where people are.
Laura Saunders: So i'm gonna give us a couple of seconds, and then i'm gonna click over and look at the answers, and you have a quick drink of water while I'm waiting.
Julie Edwards: All right. It looks like there are some questions about the code not working.
Julie Edwards: Oh, you're muted.
Laura Saunders: Yes, yeah, okay, I'm: Not sure. Why, that would be all right. Let's try. Try this code instead. 8 4 7, one.
Laura Saunders: 9, 147, and i'll put that in the chat as well
Laura Saunders: see if that works.
Laura Saunders: Hmm. Okay. And so now it's saying the voting is closed. All right. Let me try this one more time.
Laura Saunders: All right. I am so sorry I
Laura Saunders: thought I had this ready to go, but it does seem as though it may not be working.
Laura Saunders: So i'm gonna i'm gonna stop here.
Laura Saunders: And if we if you want, if you want to, just put into maybe put into the chat
Laura Saunders: all right, if you want to put into the chat, whether you have a policy. If the policy is in progress, or you don't have a policy, I think again, it could just be interesting to get a sense
Laura Saunders: all right, and it looks like
Laura Saunders: looks like we've got quite a range. So a few people do have a policies or a few places have policies. A few are in progress.
Laura Saunders: Some are saying, you don't have policies, but possibly looking into it. So that's great like I said again, just kind of wanted to get a sense of where we might be. and
Laura Saunders: i'll just kind of talk briefly about
Laura Saunders: policies and procedures. So First of all, why might we have policies, or or what will the policies do for us? I mean, just broadly speaking, in general, policies help to ensure some standardization and consistency in the way that we approach, whatever the topic of the policy is.
and it can also reduce subjectivity and put all employees on the same page, and that can be really important when you've got different people who might be Fielding questions.
Laura Saunders: So you know lots of different liaison librarians, but also. In some cases we might even have like student workers who are staffing a desk who might be getting these kinds of questions.
Laura Saunders: and it helps them to just kind of all know what the policy is, and to be able to give the same answer. So it helps to some set, some expectations and guide behaviors.
Laura Saunders: So
Laura Saunders: if we are interested in establishing a policy, or maybe revisiting a policy that we already have, there's a few things that we can do. It. It helps to establish that framework. So like, I said, reducing subjectivity and setting expectations. But we can also use a policy to outline a standard or philosophy. So we'll talk about this in a minute, but we may have a philosophy, or that we want to share with regard to information, literacy, instruction from our library in terms of
Laura Saunders: you know not just what we are going to do to deliver the instruction, but maybe what we expect in terms of how faculty, and students are going to engage with us. So if we want to get involved in developing a policy, what we want to do is determine the need research, best practices.
Laura Saunders: draft a policy, and, if possible, review it with stakeholders. You also want to just be sure, if you need any approvals that you get them. So I saw in the chat, for instance, that some places don't have policies, and and somebody mentioned about needing approval.
Laura Saunders: So you definitely want to check that out.
But once you do establish a policy, make sure that it's disseminated, and that all employees are trained on it. And you know procedures are really just how we implement the policy. So, for instance, a procedure might be the forms that faculty use to request a
Laura Saunders: to request a an information literacy set session. So if that's necessary, you want to make sure you develop those procedures as well a policy you
Laura Saunders: it can be outlined in any way that you want, but it's often good to include these areas in a policy. So the title of the policy, of course.
Laura Saunders: but also who might be the responsible office or position. If people have questions about the policy, it's always helpful to date them or give a version number, so that you know that you're always working from the most
Laura Saunders: the most recent draft, and then outlining the purpose and mission either of the the department or maybe actually, of the program. So the information literacy program itself, and then give a detailed statement of the policy with any necessary definitions. And again, any related procedures.
Laura Saunders: So if we're developing a policy for information, literacy, instruction in particular. These are some of the things that we might want to address. One is the modality or modalities in which we will offer instruction, so is it in person Only do you offer online? Is it online, synchronous, asynchronous, etc.?
Laura Saunders: You might want to identify the availability of of instruction. So, in other words, if there are certain periods of time when you might concentrate your instruction or periods of time when people may not be available, you might want to identify that
Laura Saunders: request time. So, for instance, I've definitely seen a lot of policies that will state that faculty have to submit a request for an instruction. Second session at least 2 weeks in advance. Now it's not to say that people won't actually
Laura Saunders: do the session. If If a request comes in with less lead time, but it's helpful to be able to remind people that there is a policy for the next time. A lot of the policies address faculty, attendance, and say that faculty are expected to be at the Library Instruction Sessions, so that they're not just using them, You know, as sort of a guest lecture when they can't be at class.
Laura Saunders: You can also address the content that you'll cover and or the kinds of outcomes that you're teaching to. It can be really helpful to address assessment if
Laura Saunders: if that's what you you are. If you're going to build assessment into your session or into your information literacy program overall to explain how that's done, and then any additional services that you might provide. So, in addition to
Laura Saunders: one-shot library instruction sessions, if you do things like consultations on assignment, design, development of learning, objects like live live guides, or if you're willing to be embedded into a class where maybe you come to several sessions, or are available on, as as
Laura Saunders: through a link on the learning management system, to answer student questions and things like that. All of that could be outlined in a policy. So these are just a couple of examples of information literacy policies that I thought were. You know we're very well done. And again I've linked to these at the end of the slides as well.
Laura Saunders: But this one is from Ut. Dallas. I like the fact that it starts off with the definition of information literacy, and it identifies the mission, the Information Literacy mission that they are
Laura Saunders: striving for.
Laura Saunders: And then this is also an example from University of West London.
Laura Saunders: And again, this has information, literacy, definitions, and
Laura Saunders: I would just
Laura Saunders: recommend that you go to the links at the end of the slides, and just kind of check out these 2 policies as examples, because one of the important things is that
Laura Saunders: we don't have to reinvent the wheel. I mean. Certainly we want our policy to be tailored to the needs, and in context of our own institution. But you don't necessarily have to start from scratch either. So you can look at these example policies that included a lot of useful information in terms of things like.
Laura Saunders: as I said, the request time for the the sessions, the the kinds of content that the librarians would engage with some of the other services that they offered
Laura Saunders: the mission that they were; that they were teaching towards and and things like that.
Laura Saunders: And then, you know, start this off by saying that we were going to talk about for information literacy, and so I did want to include a few additional notes on leadership.
Laura Saunders: I really do think that there are opportunities for librarians to lead in in these areas related to information literacy. And I think online learning is one of the areas where we can. We can offer some leadership. I have definitely seen just in my not just in my own institutions, but in a lot of the places where I have been, you know, visiting and consulting, and things like that that faculty and a lot of places are still struggling to really
Laura Saunders: understand how to develop robust online learning opportunities for their students. But what i'm seeing is that a lot of librarians have really just kind of
Laura Saunders: dived in and and learned a lot of this. And so I think that
Laura Saunders: offering support to faculty to the extent that we can, and it's not necessarily that we have to be, or even should be, the ones teaching them how to create those online learning experiences, but we can at least offer them library instruction, online
Laura Saunders: learning, objects, tutorials, things like that. And again, that will show them
Laura Saunders: where we have some expertise
Laura Saunders: also in terms of assessment. I was just reading something. I believe it was from Ithaca SNR again. That was
Laura Saunders: that surveyed faculty, and found that many faculty still see assessment as just sort of an additional
Laura Saunders: part of their workload, and not necessarily something that they fully integrated. And yet again, I know there's so much good work being done in library assessment. And so again, I think this is a place where we could. We could really offer some leadership in terms of showing how
Laura Saunders: learning outcomes related to the sessions that we are providing are being assessed even in in relatively informal or indirect ways. You know, assessment doesn't always have to be about graded assignments. It can be about activities. It can be about worksheets. It can be
Laura Saunders: minute papers. It can be done in lots of different ways, but it there are ways of checking in to make sure that that people are learning.
Laura Saunders: I also feel like librarians in many cases are doing some really good work around equity, diversity, and inclusion. And again, this is just such a trend in higher education right now. But I think library instruction is a place where we can
Laura Saunders: start to address some of these topics in in very small and simple ways, like just varying the kinds of examples that we use when we are, you know.
Laura Saunders: demonstrating searching and databases and things like that to to much bigger and more, you know.
Laura Saunders: mit ctl and larger examples, such as you know, engaging our our students, and even our faculty and discussions about you know the disproportionate impacts of miss and disinformation on historically marginalized communities, and and how commodification of information is limiting access to 150
to lots of different communities and things like that.
Laura Saunders: Some other trends just, really quickly credentialing, you know, developing badges and stuff like that. I was just talking to Don Simon's, junior, a colleague of mine at Westchester Community College, who is developing an information literacy, badging system for his school.
and it just sounded so great. And it, you know, not only is this a trend in higher education. You know where administrators and faculty seem to be interested in this, but it's something that students are starting to expect right
Laura Saunders: data. Literacy is a big area, especially in maybe larger research oriented organizations. And this is something that again, we're seeing faculty developing an interest in in supporting their students learning
Laura Saunders: and then workplace readiness. And this is true across higher education, you know so much emphasis is placed now on being on, you know, employment upon graduation and things like that. And here again, I think
Laura Saunders: the library can certainly lead the way in terms of helping to make sure that students have the knowledge and the resources to to both find jobs, but also, you know, to develop a lot of the skills related to information, access, and evaluation that they need
Laura Saunders: for those jobs. So you know again, a lot of it is trying to just be at the table where those decisions are being made. All right. So, as I said, there is. There are some references here, and the examples to those different policies, and I am going to
Laura Saunders: and the show here, and I think we've got 10 min or so for questions. I'm actually going to stop sharing so that I can
Laura Saunders: see a little bit better here. all right, and i'm gonna go into the chat. And I see okay.
Laura Saunders: in creating your own table. Aka Advisory Board. What about problematic library coworkers who in an academic setting, tried to take the focus off I. L, and put it on other fattish non-academic events that undermine that work of instruction librarians to make lee librarianship more professional on campus I think that's a it's a great question, you know. I think
Laura Saunders: we all certainly have
Laura Saunders: coworkers who who, unfortunately, Aren't, always engaging in the way that we would hope that they would. I think one thing that you can do, You know. It may be that there is a library, wide advisory Board.
Laura Saunders: If there is, maybe the instruction librarians can create their own Advisory Board. But I think the other thing would be if there, if you know that, because that may not be possible or feasible, or really useful. But if there is a library, wide advisory board
Laura Saunders: setting an agenda timing the agenda, right? So so
Laura Saunders: identifying like, we're going to spend this long talking about this topic and this long talking about this topic, and so really managing the meeting
Laura Saunders: can usually be helpful. And you know, trying to, and and some of it maybe just kind of sitting and talking with some of these colleagues to ask.
Laura Saunders: you know. Try to figure out, what is it that Where are they coming from and and trying to help them to understand? You know what you're trying to accomplish? We have another question. I'm embarrassed to ask this, but the word program really throws me off. How would you say a program is different from other library services? What do we mean when we say i'll program. Yes, i'm sorry I I didn't answer this question earlier, and I kept using that word. So when i'm talking about an aisle
Laura Saunders: program. I'm using that word kind of loosely to just mean like to just kind of encompass all of the instruction work that we might be doing so it could be again live instruction that we're doing in class. It could be the development of learning objects. It could be sessions where we're training faculty. It could be the development of an assessment program. So kind of all of that. In some cases we may have even a little bit more formal of an Il program where there's like
a series of embedded courses or something like that. But i'm really using the the term a little bit more informally here.
Laura Saunders: So I hope that clarifies. What about library directors and an academic library that focus on old-fashioned ideas and do not value the work that instruction librarians do one
Laura Saunders: that is definitely a challenge. And you know it is hard, because
Laura Saunders: again, by and large library directors will say that they value information, literacy and library instruction. And, in fact, again looking at someone, be it like a SNR research. That's one of the places where they expect to see growth in the coming areas and the coming years, I should say, but
Laura Saunders: just because they say they value it doesn't mean that they value it in quite the same way that we do. And then, of course, there are always going to be those those people who don't value it.
Laura Saunders: I think that there is a couple of things that we might be able to do to convince, especially library directors.
Laura Saunders: Because, like I said, one thing is looking at
Laura Saunders: accreditation requirements, especially if your your school is, is humming up for accreditation or reaccreditation in the near future, because that's always just. It takes up so much of the the time and energy on campus and kind of
Laura Saunders: showing where library work aligns with the accreditation. And in particular, if your creditors do use the the words information, literacy, I think that that can be helpful. I think, if you're able to do some assessment to show how students are
Laura Saunders: gaining skills and learning in the kinds of library instruction that you're doing, or if you haven't even been able to really engage in library instruction, finding the research that from other programs to show how how that's being done. And in fact, there's really there's been some really good research, both from
Laura Saunders: I believe it's Sarah. Why, Weinstein, I believe, is the name from the Stanford History Education Group who has actually shown that library at that
Laura Saunders: information Literary See? Instruction is actually effective. Like there is. She was able to show that there was a change in behavior for students who got that kind of library instruction in terms of
Laura Saunders: their ability to evaluate missing disinformation. And that's that's only one study. There's several studies that actually show the effectiveness of information, literacy, instruction. So I think, having that data can be helpful.
Laura Saunders: What are common realistic expectations for a librarian who is embedded in the Lms. Course. I. That actually depends, and it can vary from place to place. In some cases it just means that the librarian has sort of like a presence like it might be a link to the librarian's email address, or to the live chat or things like that. So it's kind of like.
Laura Saunders: There's something there that anytime the students go into the Lms. There's sort of that reminder there that you can get in touch with the librarian, but it's often going to be in an asynchronous way. In some cases, I think it's a little bit more formalized with it, where the librarians might actually go in and answer questions on discussion boards, and maybe even deliver instruction sessions. And when I think about embedded instruction, I often think of it happening in several over several
Laura Saunders: class periods. So in other words, not just going for a one-shot session, but actually if if you're embedded, having the opportunity to maybe do 2 or 3 or 4 sessions over the course of a semester.
Laura Saunders: It may not even be the entire class
Laura Saunders: class session, but but several times you'll be able to present some information.
Laura Saunders: Yes, the last 2 slides. Sorry about that. I will re-share, and here is These are the examples of these 2
Laura Saunders: information literacy policies, and these are the references. One more question. I come from a multi-campus library and have liaison areas on other campuses. Do you have any thoughts on outreach around the geographic challenge? That is a really great question.
Laura Saunders: And and it really that might depend, too, to at least to some extent on the culture of your organization. You know, if people are still tending to meet in person, if a lot of information exchange is happening, sort of in person, and maybe informally, and hallways and things like that.
Laura Saunders: It may be that
Laura Saunders: you have to do some traveling, and maybe you even have like one day, a week, or 1 h a week, where you are
Laura Saunders: physically present on some of these other campus campuses, or or maybe you could request to be invited to certain meetings where you think it might be helpful. But if in person is not necessarily.
Laura Saunders: you know, if if it's not, the the only way to do things, and and i'm sure it rarely is. Then I would, you know I would make as much use as possible of other forms of outreach. So
Laura Saunders: you know, email.
Laura Saunders: I know some lumberings are even doing like really short videos that they'll send by email to introduce topics, or or, you know, demonstrate a a little.
Laura Saunders: a a little skill, or something like that, like even to faculty. And again, just kind of thinking about tailoring the messages as much as possible. And, like, I said, you know, in terms of visiting other campuses, it doesn't have to be once a week even, but maybe maybe it's once a month that you're that you're physically present, and some of these other campuses, and that you do a lot of you know, email blasting before you're gonna be there in person.
Laura Saunders: all right, so it looks like I I know we've addressed, or we've touched on all the questions. I hope I was able to answer them thoroughly. If there are any other questions i'm happy, or if there's anything that I could clarify.
Laura Saunders: But otherwise thank you so much for coming.
Laura Saunders: I I really enjoy this. I really enjoy being here, and I really appreciate all of the really great thought provoking questions. So thank you.
Julie Edwards: Thank you so much, Laura. This was really excellent. I actually even love that little glitch with the technology in the middle. It brought me right back to those days in the classroom where it's like. I I tested this 5 min ago, so
Julie Edwards: that was great lot of kudos in the in the chat people are saying, this is really timely super good information, really good principles about the policy. So thank you. We really appreciate your time and expertise here.
Laura Saunders: Thank you so much.
Julie Edwards: and thank you all for joining us. We have our next academic focused Webinar coming up in the end of June, June 20, eighth. So hopefully we'll see some of you back for that. In the meantime, have a great rest of your afternoon. Thanks so much. Everyone.