Information literacy is a crucial component of any education. In the sciences, information literacy becomes more complex as the types of tasks asked of undergraduate students shift from textbooks and testing to research, navigating the literature landscape, interpreting primary literature sources, and, writing lab reports using primary literature sources.
I offer support for information literacy by working with faculty and instructors to incorporate effective literature search outcomes into course curricula. This tends to work best when it is directly tied to an outcome of the course. Maybe they have an assignment wherein they need to find two primary research articles on a given topic, edit or create a Wikipedia article on a scientific topic, or need to write an annotated bibliography. Whatever the end goal, information literacy is more effective when the students are gaining exposure to skills they can then practically apply to a course component.
Do you have thoughts or ideas around incorporating the library into your course? I'd love to hear from you.
