The Librarians offer a variety of instructional sessions to support the curriculum. Faculty members who require research are encouraged to contact Kathleen Dalton, Reference Librarian, at x4160 or via email to arrange instructional support. Please contact her as early as possible to avoid scheduling conflicts or to allow preparation time. Ms. Dalton will work with individual faculty members to tailor the library sessions to the needs of specific course assignments.

Overview of the Library Instruction Program

The Information Literacy Program is an accepted component of the core curriculum in this fifth year after its inception. The three-phase Information Literacy Program consists of teaching:

		Basic use of online catalogs and other Internet resources in sections of the Using Computers course. As the Library subscribes to more remotely-accessible databases, this presentation has shifted in emphasis from an in-depth explanation of online catalogs to a shorter explanation of the catalogs plus an explanation of Internet subscription databases and evaluations of Internet sites in general. In the Using Computers component of the Information Literacy Program the students are familiarized with the Library homepage. This familiarity enables them to discover and use quality databases on their own, search library catalogs to build bibliographies and make interlibrary loan requests.
		Basic information retrieval skills for print and electronic resources in sections of the Writing Seminar and Thought courses. Students in the Information Literacy component learn how to identify, evaluate and use sources whether paper or electronic. The Writing Seminar, which is the second component of the Information Literacy program, provides the perfect conduit for teaching first-year students these skills within the context of researching and writing papers. The English faculty have welcomed, encouraged, and helped mold this library component to best satisfy the students' research needs. All classes are carefully tailored to the assignments. All Writing Seminar courses have at least one library session and many have follow-up sessions.
		Discipline-specific information sources in print and electronic formats in research-intensive courses identified within each discipline. If the Library has added new databases or new paper sources, the faculty in that discipline will usually schedule a bibliographic instruction session to introduce that source to the students. If the database subscriptions in a discipline and the search interfaces of those databases remain the same, the emphasis in teaching this component shifts to identifying quality Internet sources.

Additional Library Instruction Sessions

Most courses with a research component also include a library component. The library components vary depending on time constraints of the syllabi and the research needs/skills of the students.

		The majority of library instruction is the traditional bibliographic instruction session, appropriate when a research assignment has been made and the faculty member wants the students to see and use the material. The session often includes time during which the students actually identify, locate, and use resources under the guidance of the librarian and the faculty.
		Some library components are lay-of -the-land tours conducted by the faculty and/or librarian. These are most appropriate in the Writing Seminar and in some first-year introductory courses.
		For some upper level courses in which the students have had previous library instruction, the library component may be bibliographies listing appropriate paper and electronic sources and quality Internet sites. These bibliographies may be distributed in class by the faculty, the students having no in-class interaction with a librarian.

All bibliographic instruction sessions vary depending on content, but increasingly, the sessions also vary depending on the format of the material covered. Options include:

		sessions focused on electronic sources only, with an accompanying session focused on paper sources.
		sessions focused on only the Internet sources, covering both using search engines such as Yahoo or Excite and evaluating the sources found.

In 1999/2000, librarians gave instructional presentations to 150 SU classes attended by a total of 2,211 students. Most students participated in at least instructional session and many students had multiple instructional sessions focused on various research areas. This labor-intensive effort represents a major commitment by the librarians to direct support of the curriculum, to interpreting an increasingly complex research environment for students, and to collaborating actively with faculty members.