Summer 2007 Information Literacy Report | Robert W. Van Houten Library

Information Literacy & the Library Website
Maya Gervits and Jessica Fadel worked on the redesign of the Architecture Library page. Bruce Slutsky, Haymwantee Sighn, Davida Scharf, and Heather Huey worked on the Research Helpdesk pages for the main library website. The requirement to move all content from one webserver to another was a time-consuming task but critical to information literacy in the fall, so it took an unwished for priority. Training was delayed, but all necessary content was eventually moved with some minor improvements as possible. All the librarians learned and used Site Studio to recode, update, restructure research help desk pages to better fit the needs of our students and guide library instruction. New pages were added; old out of date pages were updated or taken down. Bruce, using information from his Google analytics study, cleaned out the subject guides and revamped the remaining ones. Heather worked with other librarians to craft and then coded a set of 17 FAQs in Site Studio for the first time for the library website.

Information Literacy at the School of Architecture
Maya Gervits participated in a team of librarians who developed Information Competencies for Students in Design Disciplines.

Intelliresponse
Haymwantee Singh has been learning the new Intelliresponse software system being used at NJIT. With the rest of the library staff, she will input the required 85 questions to start this on online database of FAQs.

Fall Semester Instruction Preparation
The summer is the time for scheduling, organizing and planning for the busy fall semester.

Bruce Slutsky, Haymwantee Singh and Davida Scharf focused on info literacy planning with Interim Dean, John Schuring and Prof. Ron Rockland at NCE in order to create an IL implementation plan that works within the NCE curriculum. Meetings were postponed several times due to ABET planning. They met once with the new Dean during the summer who agreed with the planning that had preceded. (See the Strategic Plan for more details). This consumed much of the summer for Engineering librarians.

All librarians were active in seeking to increase collaborations with professors to prepare and schedule upcoming instructional sessions. Since our goal is to integrate closely with the existing syllabus, session preparation and collaboration though time consuming received a high priority.

Information Literacy Assessment
All librarians frequently develop and use formative assessment tools—usually exercise during or following class that put the knowledge to work in some way. The in-class exercises for architecture studio sessions and Freshman Composition classes are collected and graded by the librarians. This way, we can assess what the students were not able to understand in the session to improve information literacy instruction and to share with professors which students need more instruction. This mostly addresses ACRL standards #2 and #5. Heather Huey designed an information literacy assessment experiment to test in the fall semester in HUM 101.

Approximately 80 graduating CS majors took the iSkills test and scored somewhat higher overall than students in previous studies. ETS iSkills data from Spring 2007 was analyzed, then ETS notified us that there had been errors in the online reports, so this must still be re-analyzed.

The ETS/NJIT collaborative study team (including Davida and Heather) is still working on the draft of the study which must still go for internal peer-review at ETS.

Davida also participated in monthly conference call meetings as a member of the ETS National Advisory Board to the iSkills test. The annual meeting is scheduled for October, at the University of Central Florida.

ACRL-NJ User Education Committee
As part of the ACRL-NJ User Education Committee we began a study to assess the ICT skills and thoughts of New Jersey Academic Librarians using the ETS iSkills test. We hosted the June meeting that included a session at NJIT at which ACRL-NJ librarians could take the test and then discuss it. Only 5 librarians took the scored version of the test, so the sample was too small to be statistically meaningful. However the discussion that followed seemed to be helpful to those who attended and NJIT did advance knowledge of the test in the NJ community.

WebCT Training
The librarians turned backup support routines for WebCT. Not only will this help when Blake Haggerty is out on leave, but this training has increased our knowledge to better help students at the research help desk.

Library Video for Freshmen
Davida scripted the library video, working with Joseph Rios and staff to execute. This video is on NJIT iTunes University and the library’s homepage. This is required viewing for all First Year Seminar Courses. The students have to complete an assignment to answer questions explained in the video.

Endnote
Reference and other librarians received introductory training and a handout prepared by Davida on Endnote with instructions that have also been posted on the website

Miniversity
Heather Huey gave tours and a brief introduction to the library to all miniversity sessions in June and July.

MySpace & Facebook
Heather Huey presented on the use of myspace & facebook at Rutgers. She continues to research ways to use this tool for information literacy, yet currently finds it is most effective for marketing library resources and appearing more approachable to answer reference questions.