The proliferation of images and their increased use in academic and everyday information practices has sparked an interest in visual literacy as an area of research and library instruction. Teaching approaches and student learning are examined using theoretical frameworks and a variety of methodological strategies. This paper provides a review of research methodology adopted in empirical studies of visual literacy that were published in academic journals between 2011 and 2017.
Archival instruction pedagogy is shifting from traditional lecture-based show-and-tell approaches to more active hands-on strategies that fall within the realm of active or inquiry-based instruction. Archivists are beginning to assess their instruction sessions using reaction assessments, learning assessments, performance assessments, and blended approaches; gathering data to illustrate the efficacy of the instruction pedagogy employed and thereby shedding light on how archives contribute in meaningful ways to student learning.
New image citation standards need to be developed for college and graduate students to meet visual literacy standards. The MLA Handbook, 8th edition, and Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, do not adequately clarify how to caption, attribute, and cite images. Other image captioning and citing resources are available, but they refer to the MLA and Chicago manuals. Image captions from scholarly journals vary widely and cannot be used as examples for students to follow. Recommendations are also provided for future editions of the MLA Handbook and Chicago Manual of Style.
The London College of Communication (LCC) Zine Collection was founded in July 2009 and now contains more than 4,000 zines. It is the most heavily used special collection at LCC Library. This article outlines the history and development of the collection, its uses in teaching, learning and research, and its value for widening access to, and representing diversity in an academic library environment.
Visual literacy skills have become an inevitable part of life in today’s world. Technological innovations leading to new literacy skills have changed traditional ways of communication and made it necessary to learn and understand symbols, pictures, photos, illustrations, diagrams, infographics, pictograms, simulations, graphical interfaces, digitized images, and other visual tools. Therefore, it is very significant to teach individuals about visual literacy skills: the ability to understand, interpret, evaluate, organize, and construct visual information. Infographics are essential tools for learners. One of the most prominent institution to teach visual literacy skills is libraries. Visual tools, strategies, and methods should be applied in library instructions for users to realize these skills. The aim of the chapter is to show the importance of visualization, visual literacy, and infographics and present suggestions regarding how to develop the visual literacy skills of learners by libraries.
Design students can pose multiple challenges for librarians. Their information-seeking behaviours are often less linear than those of their university colleagues. Developing library initiations and instruction becomes even more challenging when working with international students who bring different cultural backgrounds and language competencies to their college programme. They also have varying degrees of experience with and knowledge about libraries.
Academic librarians have a demonstrated interest in digital tools for teaching and learning and often provide support for these tools to their wider campus communities. Additionally, many librarians incorporate these tools into their own teaching in the information literacy classroom. However, little has been written about how digital tools can support critical information literacy and critical pedagogy specifically in library instruction.
In a four-session Summer Bridge programme, we experimented with new curricular and pedagogical ideas with a group of incoming freshmen. We developed the Comics-Questions Curriculum (CQC), which melds students’ question asking with a focus on comics. The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale for and ongoing development of the CQC as well as the ways the CQC fosters engagement of students and librarians, builds upon students’ existing skills but propels them forward toward college-level work, and positions librarians as partners in students’ college work. Although it was designed for a specific purpose initially, the CQC in its current state is widely adaptable to other contexts beyond the original scope.
In academic libraries, information literacy traditionally focuses on instruction sessions and classes, activities in library learning spaces, and interactions with librarians. Often overlooked but equally as important to augmenting the student experience is employment in academic libraries and its relationship to the development of information and other literacies. This is particularly true concerning the contribution of special collections and archives, as most scholarship associated with primary source literacy focuses on instruction. This article begins to fill this gap by reporting the results of a series of qualitative interviews with student employees who worked directly with special collections and archives.
While much has been written about implementing the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in various classroom settings, this article addresses mapping the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education to the Framework in designing instruction for art and architecture students. Disciplinary lenses, allowing for an integrative, pragmatic heuristic, are coupled with an integration of approaches found in the library instruction literature, including faculty and librarian teaching partnerships and assessment. The versatility of mapping these professional documents is demonstrated through implementation in both one-shot and embedded instruction.
Visualizing Oral Histories: Comics and Graphic Novels/Digital Humanities Lab, is a new model for digital humanities scholarship that other librarians can follow to create and teach similar DH labs attached to humanities courses at other institutions. The model includes a preliminary syllabus and preliminary assignment rubrics designed to integrate the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education” (ACRL Framework) into course assignments. Incorporation of a DH lab into a humanities course curriculum reimagines librarian roles and creates a pedagogical strategy that explicitly incorporates information literacy standards into the undergraduate course curriculum.
Visual information is a central component of today’s information ecosystem, whether it is used to supplement other formats or as a stand-alone method for communicating. Visual information itself can come in many formats, including graphics, tables and figures, multimedia, and photographs.
For this article, an architect and librarian teamed up to systemize the means of theoretical development in architectural design students through the use of visual culture (film). To achieve their goal, they used pedagogical criteria to measure and assess the accrual of visual skills. Architectural design education is inextricable from city-based exploration and research. Traces of how architecture is taught and evaluated are embedded in the built environment. Teaching strategies that guide the development of visual literacy skills are essential in order to optimize the learning experience. To effectively apply these strategies, professors and academic librarians need to work in close collaboration to strengthen their students’ visual skills.
In the early drafts of the Information Literacy Framework for Higher Education, metaliteracy and metacognition contributed several guiding principles in recognition of the fact that information literacy concepts need to reflect students’ roles as creators and participants in research and scholarship. The authors contend that diminution of metaliteracy and metacognition occurred during later revisions of the Framework and thus diminished the document’s usefulness as a teaching tool. This article highlights the value of metaliteracy and metacognition in order to support the argument that these concepts are critical to information literacy today, and that the language of these concepts should be revisited in the language of the Framework. Certainly metacognition and metaliteracy should be included in pedagogical strategies submitted to the newly launched ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox.
The tenet of this article is that historic scientific works, along with science-themed artists’ books, photobooks, and U.S. government-produced reports, can contribute to contemporary science education in inspiring ways. By integrating these materials into undergraduate science-writing projects, we are pioneering an alternative paradigm that merges the sciences and the arts. We are teaching undergraduate science majors through content that invokes scientific curiosity, sparks creativity, and makes science accessible.
The term ‘metaliteracy’ is still a relatively new concept since being introduced into the library and information science literature as a ‘framework that integrates emerging technologies and unifies multiple literacy types’ (Jacobsen and Mackey, 2011, 62). It is therefore still a fairly recent addition to the parlance surrounding library instruction and teaching and learning practice, which this chapter will attempt to expand on.
How do artists, designers, architects and craftspeople seek and deploy information in support of their practice? It is a question that is of central importance to the learning and teaching that art libraries provide, yet one that has also been subject to much debate within the historical and contemporary literature. An attentive reading of this literature reveals three fundamental metanarratives, each underpinned by a particular epistemology, and it is these narratives that have then informed how institutions construct, embed and assess the teaching of information skills to their readers.
This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.
Teaching and learning visual literacy within art and design librarianship presents several unique challenges. Librarians are better equipped than ever to meet these challenges with the help of ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, which provides an exciting opportunity to situate visual literacy within the contextual definition of information literacy for art and design students. In mapping these two documents together the author found several ways to address the more critical components of information and visual literacy in more nuanced and meaningful ways. While art librarians have often addressed visual literacy needs to varying degrees and in creative and practical ways, a more systematic approach is needed as we move forward.
How can librarians teach information literacy in such a politicized atmosphere? In spring 2017, the library at Fresno State held a series of workshops that introduced first-year students to information literacy in a “gamification” setting, an escape room, to encourage community learning.