PLO5 Demonstrate information literacy and technological agility
Primary Learning Outcome 5 and its subparts have provided me with a strong foundation to build upon throughout my professional career. To fulfill my goal of teaching information literacy to undergraduate students, I must always be working to strengthen my own information literacy skills. Assignments I have been tasked with, have many times manifested themselves into my professional positions, including utilizing course assigned information literacy lesson plans and program plans when working at a museum, or when using course assignments, learnings, and discussions to guide me through reference desk inquiries and information literacy instruction sessions in my current role as an instruction and research librarian at a university. Libraries best support their users when they change and evolve alongside the users. I know through course work, that this is simply the beginning for me. I will continue to strengthen my information literacy skills and my technological agility to best support my user population throughout all eventual changes and evolutions. My professional goals are driven by my desire to successfully support student success, I know PLO5 will only strengthen that goal.
5.1 Exercise expert information literacy skills including the ability to identify information needs, search, evaluate, produce, and use information ethically.
Information literacy is a lifelong practice. Information could define a multitude of things, and to be literate is, in part, to effectively find needed information, search for and search through information documents, produce information, and to use various forms of information in an ethical way. Information literacy is important for everyone, effective use of information literacy benefits personal, professional, social and educational pursuits. For librarians, building expertise is essential. Librarians are often the ones tasked with teaching information literacy strategies to users. This PLO has been present throughout every assignment, and every conversation.
Two large examples of demonstrating PLO 5.1 would be through the IST668 Literacy through School Libraries lesson plan assignment and the IST605 Reference and Information Literacy Services reference scenario assignments. For the lesson plan, I had to utilize information documents to create a community analysis, adhere to NYS Common Core Standards, and develop an affective lesson plan. The lesson plan’s learning outcomes were to develop students’ information literacy skills and visual literacy skills using primary sources. For the reference scenario, I had to source multiple documents for many different source types (primary, secondary, tertiary) for a specific student working on a specific assignment to then write a reasoning for why I selected one information document rather than another. All, of course, with proper citations.
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5.2 Apply knowledge of user information behavior in various contexts.
To best assist a user or a user group, a librarian should have a knowledge of the user or the user group. Understanding human behavior, sociology, and user needs only helps a library provide reflective collections, resources, services, and programs to support the individual as well as the whole population.
When creating a lesson plan, as discussed above, I had to fully understand how to best show up for a specific class, including the class diversity make-up, age range, location, and specific student ability in order to effectively teach the class. Utilizing primary sources and art to assist students in developing visual literacy and information literacy, the lesson plan was best built when structuring the content around the users.
In IST613 Library Planning, Marketing, & Assessment, I had to write up a multipage analysis of the library’s community, constituent’s, stakeholders, institutions, and location. I needed to understand these populations in order to best organize a change for the library. I ultimately decided to recommend a more formalized partnership with the public library located in the same town. To best market this partnership, I needed to highlight portions of the public library’s services, collections and programs that would best support students, faculty and staff at the university for evidence and marketing.
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5.3 Employ research methods to investigate important questions; collect, analyze, evaluate, and communicate data; and interpret results from studies in library and information science and cognate fields.
In this program, research methods have been instilled throughout every course. Students are asked to collect, analyze, evaluate and communicate data. MLIS students are asked to interpret research or evidence from the library and information science and/or associated fields. I must demonstrate my ability to employ these abilities and these practices to succeed in my work.
In IST605, the reference scenario asked me to collect a large amount of information, analyze which sources would be best for a specific student assignment, evaluate the found sources, to then help with an imagined student working on an imagined assignment. This was a large project that required me to research and understand reference services from a professional librarian’s point of view. When building lesson plans in this program, I needed to measure success and evaluate learning outcomes, benchmark other librarian-built school lesson plans, collect relevant sources to teach, to then teach the lesson.
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IST668 Applying Critical Thinking: type of literacy program
5.4 Engage, evaluate, and deploy various technologies ethically and critically.
Critical thinking and ethics are used when engaging with, evaluating, and utilizing varying technologies effectively for the projects assigned in this program. This practice has developed my technical skills, benefiting my own educational, professional and personal pursuits.
Within this program, various projects showcase my abilities to utilize technologies. Regarding librarianship as a profession, IST613 asked me to create mockups for marketing strategies and assessment strategies, I had to source information regarding population data, benchmarking to provide evidence of success, I had to build graphs, spreadsheets and hyperlinks. In IST616 I had to utilize excel, and databases, I had to understand MARC and HTML. In IST564, I needed to rationalize why technologies regarding both facilities management and assistive technologies and their benefits for users, especially when working with differently abled users.
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IST616 Final Project: policy manual, metadata schema, and work form
MeganBetke 