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Developing an Information Literacy Action Plan
Abstract
In order to increase the benefits that the student receives from bibliographic instruction, many community college libraries are incorporating the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) into their BI programs. In order to take full advantage of the Competency Standards, community college libraries would be well advised to develop an information literacy action plan. Components of such a plan include a faculty survey, setting goals, marketing, and assessment.
... The vision of an e-visibility strategy to enhance research e-visibility for researchers is considered a crucial outcome and involves an instructional component as part of implementation, using an action plan in the development of an e-visibility strategy. Action plans have traditionally been successfully employed as part of instructional programmes in library training (Foxon 1994); and form part of the academic librarian's mandate to creating awareness of the understating and importance of inclusive comprehensive research metrics to enhancing e-visibility (Hobbs 2011;Johnson 2009;Persson & Svenningsson 2016). ...
... The PDCA (Plan-do-check-act) was employed as guidelines to the development of an e-visibility strategy allowing for defining the objectives, target group and the choice of tools to use as the intervention (Persson & Svenningsson 2016). Utilising the PDCA and incorporating appropriately identified websites and tools with social media functionalities, an effective e-visibility strategy was introduced as intervention to enhance e-visibility (Persson & Svenningsson 2016;Hobbs 2011;Johnson 2009). This culminates in an e-visibility training as part of the librarians training plan with formal training sessions for the academic year with a predetermined target group, in this case, science researchers affiliated with CAES (College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences). ...
This research on e-visibility aims at enhancing research impact and encapsulates the e-visibility themes: 1) research online presence, 2) researcher discoverability, and 3) online research output accessibility. This article reports on the perceived and actual e-visibility to establish the inclusive research impact of researchers based at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of South Africa. Bibliometric and altmetric data were collected from citation resources, the Web, academic social networking tools and an online survey. The results show a preference towards utilising free information resources and websites above fee based as part of the research online presence, researcher discoverability, research output accessibility and to ascertain their inclusive research impact. In addition, the results of the e-visibility survey reported positive responses and overall positive attitude and perceptions towards the e-visibility training. This research emphasises e-visibility training as part of an e-visibility strategy to increase research online presence, researcher discoverability and online research output accessibility in an attempt to enhance the researchers’ e-visibility.
... Some assessment techniques that are on a smaller and less expensive scale include the oneminute paper (Angelo & Cross, 1993;Choinski & Emanuel, 2006;Cunningham, 2006), an attitude survey, observational assessment, a faculty assessment survey (Cunningham, 2006), short quizzes given during a one-credit course (Hufford, 2010), online tutorials (Fain, 2011;Heimke & Matthies, 2004;Johnson, 2009;Lechner, 2005;Merz & Mark, 2002;Tronstad, Phillips, Garcia, & Harlow, 2009), interviews (Julien & Boon, 2004) and, in one case, interviews conducted by anthropologists (Kolowich, 2011). ...
Objective – Librarians at Rider University attempted to discern the basic information literacy (IL) skills of students over a two year period (2009-2011). This study aims to explore the impact of one-session information literacy instruction on student acquisition of the information literacy skills of identifying information and accessing information using a pretest/posttest design at a single institution. The research questions include: Do different student populations (in different class years, Honors students, etc.) possess different levels of IL? Does the frequency of prior IL Instruction (ILI) make a difference? Do students improve their IL skills after the ILI?
Methods – The librarians at Rider University developed the test instruments over two years and administered them to students attending the ILI sessions each semester. The test was given to students as they entered the classroom before the official start-time of the class, and the test was stopped five minutes into the class. A pretest with five questions was developed from the 1st ACRL IL Standards. A few demographic questions were added. This pretest was used in fall 2009. In spring 2010, a second pretest was developed with five questions on the 2nd ACRL IL Standards. Students of all class years who attended ILI sessions took the pretests. In 2010-2011, the pretest combining the 10 questions used in the previous year was administered to classes taking the required CMP-125 Research Writing and the BHP-150 Honors Seminar courses. An identical posttest was given to those classes that returned for a follow-up session. Only the scores from students taking both pretests and posttests were used to compare learning outcomes.
Results – Participants’ basic levels of IL skills were relatively low. Their skills in identifying needed resources (ACRL IL Standards 1) were higher than those related to information access (ACRL IL Standards 2). Freshmen in the Honors Seminar outperformed all other Rider students. No differences were found in different class years or with varying frequencies of prior IL training. In 2010-2011, students improved significantly in a few IL concepts after the ILI, but overall gains were limited.
Limitations – Many limitations are present in this study, including the challenge of developing ideal test questions and that the pretest was administered to a wide variety of classes. Also not all the IL concepts in the test were adequately addressed in these sessions. These factors would have affected the results.
Conclusions – The results defy a common assumption that students’ levels of IL proficiency correlate with their class years and the frequency of prior ILI in college. These findings fill a gap in the literature by supporting the anecdote that students do not retain or transfer their IL skills in the long term. The results raise an important question as to what can be done to help students more effectively learn and retain IL in college. The authors offer strategies to improve instruction and assessment, including experimenting with different pedagogies and creating different posttests for spring 2012.
Research e-visibility in theory enables a researcher to establish and maintain a digital
research portfolio utilising various research e-profiles on a number of research online
communities and platforms. E-visibility embodies the online presence of the researcher and their research, researcher’s discoverability via research e-profiles and the accessibility of research output on online research communities.
The rationale for this study has its foundation in the premise that enhancing the e-visibility of a researcher will increase the research and societal impact of the researcher. The development of an e-visibility strategy for the School of Environmental Sciences (SES) at the University of South Africa (Unisa) would be instrumental in enhancing the e-visibility of the researchers. This study aims at establishing guidelines for the development of an e-visibility strategy for SES researchers at Unisa as part of research support via the Library services.
Altmetric and bibliometric data of the SES researchers, were collected during the 2-year
period (December 2014 and December 2017) and e-visibility surveys were conducted at the beginning of the study (December 2014) and at the end of the study (April 2017) as part of a longitudinal e-visibility study. The data was analysed using statistical methods to ascertain:
1) the SES researchers e-visibility status, 2) the SES researchers’ perceptions about
e-visibility, 3) the altmetric-bibliometric correlations (relationships) from the altmetrics
sourced from the academic social networking tools and the bibliometrics derived from the citation resources, and 4) identifying e-visibility practices and actions increasing research and societal impact.
The results reflected a total increase in online presence, discoverability, and accessibility
therefore indicating an overall increase in the actual and perceived e-visibility of the SES
researchers. The survey conducted at the end of the study, found that 73% of the SES
researchers indicating that their e-visibility increased with online presence being enhanced, 69% were more discoverable and 76% of their research output was more accessible after applying what they learnt during the e-visibility awareness and training.
In addition, the study determined the altmetric-bibliometric correlations (Spearman) for the altmetrics and the bibliometrics from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar,
indicating strong positive correlations for ResearchGate, medium correlations for
Academia.edu, positive correlations for Mendeley and the Unisa institutional repository. The deduction can be made that the altmetrics from ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley and the Unisa Institutional Repository have a positive relationship and suggests a positive influence on the bibliometrics of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. This represents a significant contribution with empirical evidence of altmetric-bibliometric correlations (relationships) for researchers in the environmental Sciences in a South African context.
The investigation into the performance of the SES researchers regarding altmetricbibliometric distributions, trends and performance, showed increases in citation averages and h-indexes. These results were employed to identify e-visibility practices and actions which contributed to the enhancement of the e-visibility of the top performing SES researchers. The contribution of the study lies in emphasising the link between increased e-visibility contributing to increase research and societal impact. Based on the premise that increased e-visibility has an influence on citation performances and contributes to increasing research and societal impact, the results were employed to suggest guidelines for the development of an e-visibility strategy for academic librarians to aid academic librarians to adapting and embracing the changing roles of the academic librarians in developing an e-visibility strategy to enhancing e-visibility, incorporating inclusive research metrics as part of research support for researchers for research performance and research evaluation
exercises at academic institutions.
This study encourages researchers to have a comprehensive online presence to increase
the researcher discoverability by utilising research e-profiles on research communities, and linking and uploading their research output to these e-profiles. Academic librarians are encouraged to embrace and adapt to the emerging niche roles on research teams at
academic institutions. In addition, academic librarians are encouraged to take the initiative to gain knowledge and understand research metrics as part of research support to researchers, and initiate action plans and finding strategic partners in developing and
implementing of an e-visibility strategy for researchers at the institution as part of research support to enhance e-visibility.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss customizing an open‐source program called the Assignment Calculator into a tool designed specifically to serve the needs of students at California State University, Fresno, and at San José State University. The paper aims to discuss information literacy standards, students' need for convenient access to resources, time‐management and research help and the technical issues involved in such a project.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents how the steps and content of the open‐source tool were connected to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards. Subject matter was researched and evaluated from other tutorials to find the most valuable instructional concepts based on assessment of their students' needs. The paper discusses ways to customize, maintain and continue to revise the Assignment Calculator to keep it relevant and beneficial.
Findings
The customized online tool can help improve understanding of the library's role in information literacy and provides opportunity for librarians and faculty to collaborate. Statistics and a survey can yield information on usage and usefulness.
Originality/value
This case study reviews current research in incorporating information literacy concepts into an online tool. It describes the process for librarians to research and customize an open source tool and concludes that while it is initially time‐consuming, it is ultimately a rewarding experience which will improve students' understanding of these concepts.
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