FALL 2024 Instruction
There are many ways to collaborate with librarians to help students develop research and information literacy skills:
- Schedule an Information Literacy Workshop.. Librarians are available to teach in the library's classroom, N-317, in your classroom, and online. Please schedule at least one week in advance so your librarian has time to plan and prepare for the class.
- Embed a librarian or use our research and citation help resources like videos, handouts, and research guides in your Moodle page.
- Use online library collections to identify OER materials for your courses.
- Encourage students to seek research and citation help from librarians through chat, email, or appointment
Information Literacy Instruction at the BHCC Library & Learning Commons
The purpose of the instruction program is to foster and develop students' information literacy abilities:
Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning (ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, 2016).
Information literacy is necessary to succeed academically, as well as for the development of critical thinking and lifelong learning.
BHCC librarians will work with you to design a class session that supports a specific project your students are working on but also teaches core information literacy concepts.
Library instruction sessions are most useful to students when tied to an assignment. You should review the research assignment with your students before the session and schedule it at the point when they would need to begin research.
Although one class session is not sufficient to cover everything, skills and concepts that can be covered include:
- Topic exploration
- Identifying and focusing topics
- Teaching research as an exploratory and iterative process of inquiry
- Selecting specific databases or organizations with information on the topic
- Search strategies
- How to turn a research question into keywords
- How to narrow or broaden searches
- Boolean logic, truncation, and other search tips
- Using subject headings
- Using database tools to organize research sources
- Evaluation of sources
- Differentiating among scholarly, popular, and trade publications
- Verifying information's accuracy and authority
- Being aware of bias
- Identifying misinformation and disinformation online
- Scholarly communication
- How to document research sources and cite information
- How to follow citation trails
- How to read a scholarly journal article
- Identifying scholarly journals, trade journals, and other scholarly communication methods in a discipline