From an Archive to a Digital Map Edition: Introducing the Spatial Turn to an Undergraduate Writing Course

This article describes the process and outcomes of working with an undergraduate writing course as they created original scholarship for a digital map edition. Traditionally, library interventions in writing courses are limited to introducing students to library resources, developing better search terms, and research strategies. More recently librarians have incorporated primary source materials from special collections and archives into some classes as a way to engage student research. We worked with a faculty writing partner to introduce students to an archive but framed the experience through the lens of spatial thinking.

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Visual Literacy in Practice: Use of Images in Students, Academic Work

Digital technology has changed the way in which students utilize visual materials in academic work and has increased the importance of visual literacy skills. This paper reports the findings of a research project examining undergraduate and graduate students’ visual literacy skills and use of images in the context of academic work. The study explored types of visual resources used, the role that images play in academic papers and presentations, and the ways students select, evaluate, and process images. The findings of the study indicate that students lack skills in selecting, evaluating, and using images. Students use a range of visual resources in their presentations but rarely use images in papers.

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Using Visual Materials to Teach Information Literacy Outside the Arts Curriculum

Students in non-arts disciplines generally are not taught to read and interpret visual images in the same way that those in the arts are taught. As a result, students in non-arts disciplines are often uncertain how to incorporate visual primary sources into their research. Using several of the frames outlined in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as an overarching structure, as well as the pedagogical model outlined in TeachArchives.org that focuses on active learning techniques, the authors outline their instructional techniques for teaching students to work with, and even interrogate, visual resources in a non-arts-based classroom.

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Tomes/Consume This! Engaging Patron Expertise through Artists’ Books

This article presents one way that librarians, archivists, and educators can create new knowledge by connecting communities with rare material culture. The authors share how they engaged critically reflective practices while gathering descriptions of rare Mexican artists’ books at community-engaged outreach events. The books took on new meanings once they were removed from the context of the archives, and were centered within diverse communities.

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The Relationship between Metaliteracy Pretest, Posttest, and Metacognitive Strategies for Library Research Skills Scale: Creating a Metaliteracy Source for Online ED.D. Students

The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental, exploratory study was to create a metaliteracy course for online Ed.D. students and determine if there was a relationship between the Metacognitive Strategies for Library Research Skills Scale, Metaliteracy Pretest, and Metaliteracy Posttest.

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The Art of Information Literacy: New Competencies for Art, Architecture, and Design Learners

Art, architecture, and design curriculum in higher education has evolved in many ways over the past decade. While many universities and colleges still ascribe to the Bauhaus model as a core approach to instruction, shifts in technology, modes of making, global perspectives, and the professional landscape have required responsiveness on the part of these institutions. Today’s art, architecture, and design learners need to be equipped to navigate, evaluate, and ethically use vast quantities and varieties of information in their practices. As a result of these evolutions and the influence of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, library pedagogy for these disciplines has accordingly shifted away from traditional bibliographic instruction and towards information literacy-based approaches.

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Teaching Students to Critically Read Digital Images: A Visual Literacy Approach Using the DIG Method

This innovative teaching idea, the Digital Image Guide (DIG) Method, addresses the pressing need to develop visual pedagogies in the university classroom by providing a technique for students to use to critically read digital images. This article also introduces the concept of shallow and deep images. It then explains the difference between the two types of images and how to use the DIG Method to dig deeper in order to understand deep images. By utilizing the DIG Method, students can learn to analyze, interpret, evaluate and comprehend images found on social media sites and around the web, increasing their visual literacy skills in the process.

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Social Media and New Visual Literacies: Proposal Based on an Innovative Teaching Project

Social networks and collaboration make it possible to offer new metacognitive horizons for comprehension of theories in a group of students considered digitally native. This study discusses the applicability of different forms of visualisation used as a constructivist learning technique on social networks.

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Representing Gender: Visual Literacy Instruction in the Academic Library

Contemporary society is dominated by visual communication, yet visual literacy is a learned skill that requires training. Gender issues, particularly the subjects of gender diversity and power struggles, are deeply pertinent to today’s visual culture. The critical consumption of information has long been taught in libraries, though instruction has typically prioritized text-based sources. However, visual literacy instruction has the capacity to provoke critical inquiry into issues of gender, race, social class, and ethnicity. As institutions that promote social justice, libraries can help improve diversity and inclusion in their communities through teaching visual literacy skills at all levels. Critical visual literacy instruction can also help academic libraries advance student scholarship, which can only be achieved if they are literate in all forms of knowledge production.

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Gaming for Multiliteracies: Video Games in a Case Study with Primary School Students to Enhance Information, Visual and Media Literacies

The aims of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of video games when learning multiliteracies competences, study how to use video games on educational contexts, carry through a program with primary school students, and draw recommendations to design similar projects.

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Collecting Virtual and Augmented Reality in the Twenty-First Century Library

In this paper, we discuss possible pedagogical applications for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), within a humanities/social sciences curriculum, articulating a critical need for academic libraries to collect and curate 3D objects. We contend that building infrastructure is critical to keep pace with innovative pedagogies and scholarship. We offer theoretical avenues for libraries to build a repository 3D object files to be used in VR and AR tools and sketch some anticipated challenges. To build an infrastructure to support VR/AR collections, we have collaborated with College of Liberal Arts to pilot a program in which Libraries and CLA faculty work together to bring VR/AR into liberal arts curricula.

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A Didactic Innovation Project in Higher Education through a Visual and Academic Literacy Competence-based Program

This research paper describes the application of a didactic innovation project in Higher Education. We present the theoretical foundation of the project. Thanks to the evolution of the Web and the potential of image to disseminate and generate knowledge, visual materials have had an increasingly powerful projection in Education, especially for the development of new methods, media and didactic materials in Higher Education. As a result of researchers interested in it, Visual Literacy has emerged as an academic field developing research and didactic effectiveness of the image, and digital competences and academic literacy as instruments to be integrated into curriculum of higher education for its excellence. We analyse the didactic innovation project by presenting how we integrated a Visual and Academic Literacy competence-based program into a course at the Carlos III University of Madrid.

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Visual Literacy, News Literacy, and the Fight Against Misinformation

This column explores the ways in which the new generation of librarians can position themselves at the front lines of the misinformation and “fake news” crisis by incorporating visual literacy and news literacy into information literacy lessons.

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The Art of Evidence: A Method for Instructing Students in Art History Research

Within various disciplines, contextual sources such as history, theory, and criticism are used to support knowledge claims. However, the discipline of art history assigns the undergraduate a particular challenge with regard to secondary source use.

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Supporting Multimodal Literacy in Library Instruction

Students interact with information in many ways throughout the day, code switching between modes depending on their needs. Educators are finally realizing that composing in more than one mode is not only important, but also necessary. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of the academic library, the ACRL Framework and information literacy instruction in creating ethical, inspired users. This paper looks at previously published work on multimodal discourse, how libraries have supported modes in the past and how the ACRL Information Literacy Framework highlights the need to teach students and faculty how to compose in many modes.

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Seeing the Bigger Picture: Archival Description of Visual Information

Description is an essential library service of which reads may be unaware. The catalouge reveals where the desired item is; the item is retrieved. That seems easy. But the description of materials in special collections is often more complex, and sometimes even the fundamental nomenclature indicating what an item is can be difficult to identify.

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Reading Her Queenly Coiffure: A Collaborative Approach to the Study of Marie-Antoinette’s Hairstyles

Four colleagues–a faculty member, a digital services librarian, a research librarian, and a curator of Special Collections–take turns describing their role in creating an undergraduate student project around an eighteenth-century almanac that belonged to Marie-Antoinette. In recounting the steps taken, the collaborative process, the student research, and the analysis of the contents of the Trésor des Grâces almanac, we share the lessons learned for completing a digital exhibit over the course of one semester.

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Playfulness in the Archives: Enhancing Digital Collections through Card Sorting

Regardless of institutional type or resources, one question facing archives and special collections is how archival collections can be efficiently enhanced with minimal or no original metadata. This issue becomes a focal point when collections are digitized, as metadata is what makes digital collections more accessible and usable. This case study explores the development of a digital collection using card sorting activities and gamification techniques and analyzes the direct and indirect effects of each strategy, including student employee connections to library learning goals and visual literacy standards.

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Placing Research on their Map: Curriculum Mapping as a Collaboration Tool for an Architecture Branch Library

This article presents the authors’ efforts to collaborate with faculty in a curriculum-mapping program that enables shared understanding of curricular objectives and goals. By collaborating and coordinating with faculty for embedded library sessions or modules, this program can be used to strengthen information and research competencies at the appropriate academic levels throughout the degree program. Curriculum mapping helps communicate opportunities to bring together teaching and learning from the lecture hall and studio to the library where students can be introduced to pertinent resources and information that will support their course work and build their understanding of research.

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