Increasing library value for users by registering a short course in information literacy

Abstract

Academic libraries increasingly need to add value to their universities and their strategic goals.Providing discovery tools and access to information is a key function that libraries are steering, but further to that is the importance of helping users find and make sense of information in an information overloaded society.Users are often unaware of what libraries offer in terms of information sources and tools, where to access it and how to use it.Therefore, information literacy teaching and all its facets is one of the core functions of a library ensuring that users can use the discovery tools and navigate the access to information.The Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) Council approved an information literacy policy in 2009.The CPUT policy states that all programmes must integrate information literacy within the curriculum.One of the ways the library has assisted faculties with this was to register a short course called Certificate of Information Literacy (CIL) which was offered in this format for the first time in 2013.The short course consists of five modules, which are: developing a searching strategy to access relevant information; information sources and tools to access peer-reviewed sources; evaluating of information; legal use of information and bibliographic referencing.Students are given many practical hands-on exercises during class time and have to pass a summative online assessment via a Learning Management System (LMS), in this case Blackboard, to receive the certificate.This paper will discuss the process that was followed, strategic partnerships that were formed, the administrative framework that had to be put in place, the curriculum, assessment instrument and implementation.It will highlight some challenges as well as comparing Information Literacy teaching statistics of 2013-2014 with previous years before the introduction of the short course.Areas for further research and strategies will also be discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.