Faculty Guide to Leslie J. Savage Library: Library Liaison

Your library liaison is a key resource for you, as faculty, and for your students. While not an exhaustive list by any means, some of the more common areas of support are: 

• Information literacy instruction & in-depth research assistance to help students develop core and discipline-specific skills; preparation for course assignments and projects; lifelong learning.
• Collection development with your program’s needs in mind; raising awareness of current resources available, including database demonstrations.
• Literature reviews to assist with program exploration and research to support grant applications and renewals.
• Department resource analyses to assess for currency and relevancy and identify any gaps; accreditation review support.

Information literacy instruction helps your students develop and hone the skills necessary to be critical information consumers, content creators, and lifelong learners. Importantly, these skills also support student success in your courses.

We can provide instructional sessions in a variety of ways to meet your needs and schedules. 

• Live instruction— build your librarian into a regularly scheduled class, either in-person or via Zoom/Teams, to go over everything from basic fact-checking and introducing peer review to advanced database skills and Zotero. The library’s computer classroom (LIB 102) has 28 workstations for student use, but you can also encourage students to bring their own devices. If your usual classroom has workstations, we can also meet in your classroom.

• YouTube Video Tutorials—if you would like a series of short videos on different topics, you can embed library videos onto your Canvas page, or request a custom video specific to your class. Videos are captioned and accessible. The expected turnaround is around 3-4 weeks for recording, captioning, and editing for viewing, so please send requests as soon as possible.

• Assignments—best combined with another format (live session or video). We can create personalized library exercises that build and reinforce the skills and tools shown in pre-recorded or live sessions, in order to put skills into practice.

• Individual student sessions—if you cannot find time to fit me in, please encourage your students to make an individual appointment with a librarian (the link is to book-a-librarian, but students may also email librarians directly). We can develop a research-based assignment to ensure that they meet with me at least once during the semester.

As always, the library is here to support you and your students. Please contact us with any questions about textbook reserves, off-campus access issues, and other resource access.

Research suggests that information literacy instruction can help support student success and retention. 

• The Impact of Information Literacy Instruction on Student Success: A Multi-Institutional Investigation and Analysis

• Effects of Information Literacy Skills on Student Writing and Course Performance
• Information Literacy and Retention: A Case Study of the Value of the Library