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An Information Literacy umbrella for instruction.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Instructional activities at Joyner Library, East Carolina University, currently include course-integrated instruction, online tutorial use, class web pages, research consultations, a customizable subject guide database, and a writing contest. These instructional activities can be more usefully planned and evaluated with proper program building. With an improved planning process, an "Information Literacy umbrella" will also allow the instruction librarians to target certain student groups more effectively, specifically incoming first-year students, distance education students, and students who are participating in a new 3-year-to-degree program.

Introduction

East Carolina University is a public doctoral university that serves more than 20,000 students from its Greenville, North Carolina, campus. Joyner Library serves the University's liberal arts, sciences and professional fields for on-campus and distance education students. Library instruction at Joyner comes through several venues. Teaching faculty members may request course integrated library instruction for their sessions; students can sign up for individualized research consultations; and the Reference Department web site hosts several instructional tools: an online tutorial called "Seven Step Guide to Library Research," web pages for specific classes and a customizable subject guide database named Pirate Source. Another instructional outreach activity, one which fosters faculty collaboration, is the W. Keats Sparrow English 1200 Award, a First-Year English Composition Award developed and implemented by the librarians at Joyner Library. [1]

We are pleased with the variety of instructional activities we offer and would like to see them continue to improve. One means of improvement involves the programmatic structures that guide our planning and coordinate our attempts to evaluate our services. Improved planning and better use of evaluations result in more effective strategies for content delivery, improved training for instructional techniques, and increased ability to target new user groups for effective instruction. Envisioning an Information Literacy umbrella provides us with a conceptual image to describe these developing structures. This article will use the image of an Information Literacy umbrella to address current instructional practices at Joyner Library, and to describe both future initiatives and the potential means of improving these services by gathering them under an Information Literacy structure.

Current Instructional Activities

Most of our visible instruction activities take place in Joyner's electronic classrooms. These classes are the easiest activities to point to, in a sense. The majority of our teaching sessions are one-time course integrated instruction sessions. While librarians from other public services schedule and teach library instruction sessions, the greatest number of classes are taught by Reference librarians in response to requests from teaching faculty to the Coordinator of Instructional Services via email, telephone, or the library's electronic request form. The Coordinator discusses content of the sessions with the faculty member and ensures that library staff teaching the...

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