July 14, 2008 Meeting of User Education Committee

Agenda not yet available.

Members Present: Susan Avery (ex officio), Paula Carns (09), Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (ex officio) – Chair, Emily Love (ex officio), Karen Hogenboom (09)

Members Absent: Melody Allison (10), Merinda Hensley (ex officio), Lori Mestre (ex officio), Ellen Swain (09), Nikki Wright (08), Nathan Yarasavage (10), Bernice Harrington (09)

Additional Attendees: Sarah Bordac (Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Brown University), Melissa Bowles-Terry (Reference Library Instruction GA)

1. Remaining Meetings for 2007-2008 (All in Library 428)

• August 11, 10-11

2. Media Literacy – Guest: Sarah Bordac, Brown University

Sarah is Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Brown University and a doctoral student at Simmons in Library and Information Science.

Sarah reported on some of her work at Brown.

• She has been observing librarians to see what they’re teaching, how they’re teaching, and how their instructional activities can be integrated with instructional technology. She has worked on developing modules of content for librarians to drop into their subject guides or courses in WebCT. She has found that library classes are typically held in a classroom with computers that never get turned on – but she’s working on changing that situation.
• An exciting development at Brown is that the library is to be the main source of content and outreach activity in support of a first-year reading experience for incoming students. This is a great opportunity for the library to reach out to students as they first enter the university. There is no required information literacy course at Brown and no required library component of any of the courses there, so hooking students at the very beginning of their university career is important.
• She is working with the user research & interface services group on a redesign of the library website. They have conducted internal usability testing with library staff. One of the next steps is to conduct usability testing with university undergraduates when students come back to campus this fall. Also, with the new website, they are considering creating a collection of widgets so that users can customize their own library homepage. (The University of Rochester is doing this right now.)

Sarah also reported on her doctoral work:

• She has conducted a survey of 1st-year seminar faculty to find out what instructional services from the library they use and what ACRL Information Literacy standards are important to them in their courses. The idea behind the survey is to market library services to faculty.
• She is also working on the question of standards in media literacy. Quite a bit of work has been done in this area regarding K-12 students, but not much in undergraduate students. Everybody expects undergraduates to know all about new media, and have basic media literacy, but universities generally don’t spend time teaching those skills. Universities have not kept up with the user trajectory.
• Sarah has also surveyed faculty about media literacy skills. Some of the questions she’s interested in finding answers to:
  • Do media literacy skills change with different types of media?
  • Do skills change across disciplines?
  • Are these skills assessed?
  • So far, it looks like the answers to these questions are yes, yes, and no.

3. Campus Initiative on Student Learning Assessment – Questions?
The final report from the library on Student Learning Assessment turned out quite well. We have not yet received feedback on the document.

4. Working Groups Update
Community Outreach Working Group

• The Community Outreach Working Group has been renamed – it is now the High School Outreach Working Group.
• Karen Hogenboom will be teaching government teachers from the local school district how to teach their students about voting issues. Drawing on the excitement around the upcoming election this fall, they will discuss voter education and how to train high school students to be informed voters. This is a teacher in-service meeting that will take place on or around October 15.

LibGuides Implementation

• We have a second implementation of LibGuides just for staff training.
• The web address for staff training LibGuides is http://uiuc-training.libguides.com/.
• Cataloging and Acquisitions are already adding guides.
• If anyone wants an account in this implementation, contact Merinda Hensley or Beth Woodard.
• If you need to copy material from old LibGuides to new LibGuides  contact Merinda.
• Lisa gave a quick demonstration of the administration side of LibGuides for Sarah.

Respectfully submitted,

Melissa Bowles-Terry