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Month: April 2015

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Today our guest is Caroline Reed, Director of Research, Instruction and Outreach Services in the Jane Bancroft Cook Library at New College of Florida in Sarasota. I met Caroline at ACRL 2015 and when she told me about her innovative use of the Project SAILS test, I asked her to tell the story here.

Question: Would you briefly describe the information literacy program at New College of Florida?

Caroline: We are in the early stages of developing our information literacy program. Currently we do the traditional one-shots requested by faculty. We also encourage students to make consultation appointments with librarians. We have recently developed a liaison program with faculty where each of our instruction librarians is responsible to one of our three divisions--Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.

Library instruction is a part of all Seminars in Critical Thinking, which are research and writing intensive classes originally set up as part of our QEP, as well as our WEC (Writing Enhanced Classes).

We have a librarian who is a Wikipedia Ambassador. She has been able to work with faculty and students to edit and create Wikipedia entries as replacements for the traditional research paper assignments.

Librarians work with students on annotated bibliography projects as part of the January Independent Study Project (ISP) that 1st - 3rd years have to complete. This year one of our librarians actually sponsored the ISP so that she was the faculty member of record on those projects.

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Hi Everyone,

In March, at the ACRL Conference in Portland, Carrick Enterprises sponsored an exhibit booth. Rick, Carolyn, and their colleague Paula McMillen fielded questions about the Threshold Achievement Test.  Many librarians from institutions as varied as chiropractic colleges, state universities, and community colleges from across the country expressed interest in taking part in the field test scheduled for this fall.

The field test will generate data that we’ll use to set criteria for scoring the test and will give us the chance to analyze individual items.  It will give the participating institutions a snapshot of their students’ information literacy knowledge practices and dispositions.

But the discussions at the booth weren’t all business.  Attendees also got to take a Facebook-style quiz to reveal which of the IL frames best matched their personality.  If you missed your chance to take the quiz and find out if you know yourself, your friends, and the Frames as well as you thought you did, then plan to stop by the Project SAILS, Carrick Enterprises booth at ALA in San Francisco at the end of June.  And as you check out everyone’s name badges, look for their Threshold Achievement Test stickers that proclaim their Frame.

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