APLA 2019

Librarians at Mount Saint Vincent University have been teaching a fully weighted credit course in information literacy since 2009.  In 2017 we reported on our experience getting this course mainstreamed in the curriculum via an article in Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice & Research, entitled “A Course of Our Own: Taking an Information Literacy Credit Course from Inception to Reality.”  Now that LIBR2100: Introduction to Research in the Information Age has been running for 10 years this follow-up research project delves into outcomes.  The data set from which we are working provides us with details on who are students have been over the last 10 years.  Cohorts include both Canadian and international students.  Students took this course right out of high school and also enrolled as mature or returning students.  Course sections were offered in traditional on-campus classrooms as well as via distance educational technologies.  Some students took LIBR2100 to fulfill degree requirements while others selected the course as a Humanities elective.   

The data set allows us to compare students who have taken LIBR2100 with a control group who have not.  Is the course making a difference? Are students who take LIBR2100 graduating at higher rates? Do they have higher GPAs upon graduation? Are some groups benefiting more from the course than others? 

This presentation will provide preliminary answers to these and other questions, and hopefully will provide more evidence for librarians considering starting a similar course at their university or college. 

In 2016, MUN Libraries implemented Leganto, a new online course reserves system. Since its inception it has transformed the way reserves are handled at Memorial, in turn enhancing our service model for students and instructors. The success of Leganto at Memorial prompted the library’s multi-branch Leganto Committee to wonder, are reserves just the tip of the iceberg?
Early experiments by committee members revealed the potential of Leganto as a teaching and learning technology. Although marketed as a reserves system, we found that it could also be used to bring together guides, assignment materials, assessments, and learning objects for use during and after classroom instruction. To further explore this application of Leganto, librarians at Memorial were invited to participate in a formal pilot. The goals of the pilot were to create opportunities for instruction librarians to experiment with Leganto, as we investigated its potential to support IL. Participating librarians received technical and pedagogical support, and were encouraged to experiment and provide feedback. Participants decided individually when and how to integrate Leganto into their class design, resulting in a variety of interesting applications of the resource.
In this presentation we will provide further detail about the Leganto Information Literacy Pilot at Memorial Libraries. We will focus on the rationale behind this unique application of Leganto, and discoveries made as a result of the pilot. We will also discuss the design and workflow of the pilot, evaluation and participant feedback, identified challenges, and possible future directions.

Within the past few years, many Canadian universities have ceased contributing their theses and dissertations to the Proquest Theses and Dissertations database. The database, abbreviated as PQDT, had for a long time been the largest and most reliable source of indexing and, later, full text of theses and dissertations within North America and many other parts of the world. But the rise of institutional repositories, the open access movement, and issues with the quality of PQDT digitization have all led to a decline in university contributions to PQDT, particularly from Canada. The database no longer provides the “one-stop shopping” it once did for graduate students, researchers, and library staff seeking the freshest and newest academic research.

This presentation will report on a research project that involved testing and ranking 12 theses and dissertation gateways using the following criteria: Ease of use, Search capabilities, Geographic location of content, Amount and currency of content, Unique features, and Presence of sham content. The goal of the research is to rank the top contenders to replace PQDT, giving graduate students, researchers, and library staff a new list – likely longer than 1 but hopefully shorter than 12 – of the best databases to use to discover theses and dissertations on a subject.

The Academic Success Kit (ASK) is an online tool developed for Acadia faculty members to direct students to the scholarly help they need. Using a simple web form embedded in courseware, instructors or professors can quickly and clearly articulate to a student what services are available to them to help improve their papers and assignments. The form lists research and writing elements, such as finding scholarly sources, properly citing materials, improving sentence structure and grammar, etc. that faculty can select while marking an assignment. Upon submission, the populated form is emailed to the student, letting them know precisely what they need to improve upon, and, more importantly, where and how to get help – through the Library or the Writing Centre. This tool seeks to close the gap between a student receiving a marked assignment and then seeking the help they need to improve their work. In this session, Jennifer and Maggie will speak to the development of the ASK tool and review preliminary findings from the pilot launch.