The core of our basic information literacy curriculum is our integration in the first year, general education course sequences. Within these courses, students learn techniques for finding, interpreting, and evaluating information sources. Bryant Moore, our First Year Experience Librarian is charged with developing and maintaining our first-year/general education information literacy program. We also have a number of videos and tutorials that can be embedded in your course pages in Blackboard. These focus on information literacy, including basic research techniques, evaluating information, using citations, and avoiding plagiarism. You can find links and embed codes on our Self Service Library Instruction page.
Our subject librarians provide course-specific and more advanced instruction for your research-oriented courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Since we have moved our core information literacy instruction to general education courses, we are able to focus instruction on in-depth research techniques and information sources that are directly related to the projects for an individual class. We offer both online and in person instruction in order to best support a variety of learning modes. When requesting instruction, please let us know the details of your assignments so that we can customize instruction to best benefit the students and avoid repetition. The College of Business is served by Rachel Pecotte, and the College of Education & Human Development by Kimberly Grotewold. The College of Arts & Sciences has two subject librarians: Megan Gonzales for Language, Literature, Arts, Political Science, Criminology, Philosophy, Geography, and Music and Alexandra Quintero Deleon for Computational, Engineering, and Mathematical Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Health and Behavioral Sciences. Our Head of Archives & Special Collections, Leslie Stapleton, provides instruction for History and other courses that cover archival research.
Research Guides are webpages that help direct students to the best resources for their projects. We have currently have guides for many subjects and the subject librarians have linked some of these guides to courses in Blackboard. We encourage you to promote the Research Guide link in Blackboard to your students as well as even include the links to the guides in your syllabi.
If you do not see a guide that meets the needs of your course, please let your subject librarian know. We can create guides for individual courses or special assignments on request.
If you want your students to have a quick refresher on citations, the research process, or learn to think more critically about information sources, the videos and activities on our Self Service Library Instruction guide will help. All of these tools can be used without the need to ask a librarian to attend your class. Simply copy and paste the links to the videos and tutorials you want students to use, or refer to the embed codes to get the script to embed the full video or tutorial into your blackboard course. You can also assign students selections from our Academic Tools for the Research Process online tutorial page. These tutorials include short quizzes and email confirmation of completion.
Our current selection of videos and tutorials are created by Credo, the company that also provides one of our most important general reference databases. We can also create tutorials here at A&M-SA based on faculty demand. If you have suggestions for tutorials, please fill out this online form and let us know.
If you have a course where you want your students to interact with a librarian throughout the semester, consider having an embedded librarian in Blackboard. In this role, the librarian acts as a teaching assistant or co-teacher. This program is most successful with hybrid and fully online classes. Depending on the course design, the librarian may have a very limited presence, for example, running an ongoing discussion thread on research techniques, or may be involved in creating more focused activities, regular discussions, live chats, and on-line instruction through video conferencing