Last week, the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) brought together comic art and graphic novel fans, illustrators, artists, gamers, celebrities, educators, and librarians. Numerous events and seminars across the San Diego Convention Center and the San Diego Central Library (SDCL) covered diverse topics ranging from “Designing the Costumes of Wakanda” to “A Crash Course to European Comics.” This conference provided a great opportunity for librarians seeking to learn more about the latest publications, trends, and scholarly works on comic research. 

Addressing information literacy with first year students is a multifaceted challenge. Librarians may be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Framework for Information Literacy’s threshold concepts. Faculty buy-in (or lack thereof) can help or hinder. Students potentially hold misconceptions, as illustrated by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe’s research. Finally, some institutions, such as my community college, do not provide 1) a formal first year experience and/or 2) a credit-bearing IL course. You know where this leads: a Framework-skittish instructional librarian standing for about an hour in front of students who think they can Google the answer to anything and faculty who just want you to “show some databases.”

Did you know that selected regional accreditation programs may include information literacy as a core competency skill? Are you involved in the accreditation process for your school or library? Today, many academic libraries are tasked with providing students’ IL learning data for accreditation purposes.

Bryant University is known for its vigorous academic program, a design thinking experience for first year students, and a campuswide focus on student success. The culture at Bryant provides fertile ground for innovation at all levels of the university. The Douglas and Judith Krupp Library embraces this culture and the elements of flexibility, experimentation, and collaboration, offering library staff the opportunity to innovate within the library and with campus partners.

The success of our information literacy program was achieved largely through continuous and collegial collaboration between the library and its campus partners. The Writing Center, faculty, and various committees have all participated in a productive give and take that helps ensure students pick up IL skills early and use them often.

By Kenya Flash and Raymond Pun

Thinking of creative ways to teach the ACRL Frames using Credo? We began our discussion of Credo and the ACRL Frames, here. In this piece, we’ll cover three additional frames that will assist you in diving deeper into the complexities of research for your students. The three frames we will explore through this post:

Tens of thousands of new pieces of content appear online daily, and sorting through it can be a challenge for everyone from consumers, to media platforms, to search algorithms. As we’ve seen over the past year, this jungle of information provides plenty of camouflage for purveyors of fake news.

Instructional librarian Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has been researching what misconceptions about information literacy students carry with them to college, and investigating what types of pedagogical responses best correct these. In a recent webinar she discussed the challenges of teaching information literacy to first year students, and shared her initial findings. Download the full recording here, and view her presentation slides here.  

By Kenya Flash and Raymond Pun

Are you looking for creative ways to teach the ACRL Frames? In this piece, we’ll cover three frames that can be used to dive deeper into the complexities of the research process, and show how Credo can help students put these concepts into action.

Collins Dictionary recently named “Fake News” the word of the year for 2017. From Croatian troll farms, to Russian government propaganda, to social media, to Presidential press briefings, the creation of intentionally misleading articles has dominated our discussions this year. Unfortunately, it’s about to get much, much worse.