By Anna Yang and Raymond Pun

Today, health sciences education programs are growing rapidly across the United States. As a result, there are more opportunities to work as a health sciences librarian teaching and supporting information literacy in disciplines like nutrition, physical therapy, nursing, public health, and pharmacy. In this interview, librarian Anna Yang shares her experiences supporting information literacy in this expanding field.

This semester, have you collaborated with a teaching faculty or a student affairs colleague in designing an assignment, curriculum, or program for student learning and engagement that utilizes library resources or services including instruction? In this post, we’ll highlight this High-Impact Practice (HIP) and review 3 open access resources for you to explore when designing collaborative activities for the spring semester!

Sayings about standing on the shoulders of giants and not reinventing the wheel ring as true in librarianship as they do in other endeavors. You don’t have to go it alone, a happy thought when the library is packed with students cramming for finals and the holidays aren’t far off. Credo’s got your back: we are announcing one refreshed resource and a new item you can immediately put to use to improve and/or expand your IL efforts.

By Andrew Carlos and Raymond Pun

Memes are an inescapable part of today’s online culture. The Internet is filled with memes: images, videos, texts, or ideas created and virally shared by one person to another to critique or reinforce a specific culture. They can be satirical, ironic, or graphic, and may make references to popular culture like the Batman meme you see here. Memes can also help students make important connections during your library instruction.

This blog series provides easy, free access to open web resources and content that support affordable learning opportunities. A wide variety of resources published by government entities, think tanks, and more are curated to demonstrate what may be relatively unknown or ‘buried’ in the internet. Resources reflect issues happening today for the use of librarians, students, and all audiences.

Looking to up your library's social media game? One of the best ways to engage followers to is to provide a consistent stream of fun/useful content. Understanding that libraries don't always have the time to generate all of the content they'd like, we're here to help! 

Adaptive Learning Using Assessment
Those of you lucky enough to see students for more than one-shot sessions are likely doing some assessment of student progress in your classes. Or maybe you’re embedded in a professor’s class where assessment of IL learning is allowed. Either way, consider guidance from a 2017 article by Johannes Peter, Nikolas Leichner, Anne-Kathrin Mayer, and Günter Kramplen, “Making Information Literacy Instruction More Efficient by Providing Individual feedback”

By Jillian Eslami and Raymond Pun

California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) is a public university in the 23-school California State University system. In this interview, librarian Jillian Eslami shares her experiences supporting FYE through outreach, engagement, and programming across campus. Jillian also mentions her new work collaborating with student government to form a Student Advisory Group for the library.

By Melissa Cardenas-Dow and Raymond Pun

With a greater emphasis on data and numbers, the social sciences are becoming more interdisciplinary-based, with an increased focus on research methods and data collection plans. But what does that mean for instruction librarians supporting these research areas? The social sciences include fields like history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, women’s studies, geography, political science, economics, and more. In this interview, social sciences librarian Melissa Cardenas-Dow shares her approach to teaching information literacy, and recommends selected sources to tap into the interdisciplinary nature of the social sciences. 

I recently attended the annual Charleston Conference in Charleston, South Carolina (November 5-9, 2018) for the first time. This conference is known as an important event to attend if your work involves scholarly communication, library publishing, collection development, acquisitions or e-resource management. The sessions and discussions covered many interesting and emerging issues including discovery, technology trends, budgeting, analysis and assessment, and user statistics. I learned quite a bit in this conference and chatted with publishers and vendors who shared some upcoming features in their products and services too.