SAGES First Seminar Library instruction sessions

Rationale

Rather than merely touring the library building or being handed a list of resources, library instruction sessions at Case Western Reserve University's Kelvin Smith Library are integrated and customized for academic courses, and this integration begins with the freshman's introduction to scholarship at the university level: SAGES First Seminar.

For example, if the students in a particular section of First Seminar are studying human intelligence, the librarian will focus the kinds of tools and materials he shows during the session on that topic, using examples drawn from those students' paper topics or their current syllabus readings. This method of contextualizing the content presented makes the session more immediately useful for the students. As such, they can see the use of the materials and tools to their specific information needs. Not only are they learning information seeking skills that will serve them a lifetime, they are learning skills that will help them today!

Objectives

For freshman library sessions, we have four main objectives:

• knowing what kinds of resources are available for generating ideas and finding background information on that idea
• becoming familiar with the library catalog and how to find both physical and electronic materials using it
• understanding the OhioLink library consortia and how to borrow books on the OhioLink Central Catalog
• ability to use library databases to find magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles on a given topic

Within these objectives, the customization of the session can mean that one topic is covered more exhaustively than another. We also integrate a number of "did you know?" pieces of information throughout the session, such as "did you know the Kelvin Smith Library owns over 10,000 films on VHS and DVD?" This keeps the sessions lively and interesting. We are also, of course, responsive to requests from faculty to teach specific resources.

These objectives are taken from a larger set of Information Literacy competency standards compiled by the Association for College and Research Libraries.

Outcomes

We are able to measure our success with these objectives in two ways, informal and formal.

Informally, faculty tell us that students found the session useful; that the session was mentioned on the course reviews; or that research done by the students was of higher quality than in the past.

Formally, we have found that creating class-specific, short homework assignments is useful in two ways: first, it gives the students a chance to put into use the tools, methods, and resources covered during the session. Second, in evaluating these assignments, we are able to tell if our objectives were met. For example, our objective is that 90% of the students meet the objectives listed above. The homework assignment will address these objectives. Then, as we look over the returned assignments, we are able to see if our objectives were met.

Here is an example of a "generic" First Seminar homework assignment. The individual questions can be changed to match the topic of the specific section of First Seminar.