Information Literacy
Information and digital literacies are vital for today’s professionals, providing key foundations for finding, evaluating, and using information in support of lifelong learning and flexibility in a rapidly-changing environment. Quimby Library encourages all faculty members to work with the library staff as we seek to develop the best learning commons strategies for our unique experiential, environmental curriculum.
- First Year: Librarians seek to partner with general education providers to ensure that entry-level students know how to reach us, are aware of the various kinds of resources that are available (library catalog, subscription databases, periodicals, search engine strategies, multimedia equipment and services), and to begin critically evaluating all resources for relevance, authenticity and reliability.
- Sophomore: Librarians seek to work with both general education providers and faculty members within the disciplines to help students learn about some of the different kinds of specialized subject collections and primary sources; at this level, students should be able to perform more sophisticated searches, learn how to best approach searching specialized databases and other tools (such as adjacency, field searching, nested searching, and limiters), and receive some exposure to primary sources. They should have had opportunities to engage with library multimedia equipment, software and services.
- Junior and Senior: At this level, librarians partner with faculty in the disciplines so as to help students build proficiency and sophistication, gaining a deeper understanding of their field and an interdisciplinary understanding of their field within the greater context of knowledge, and use a variety of communication strategies and formats, ultimately discovering and sharing new perspectives and contributing new knowledge to the world.
