Faculty + Librarian Collaboration ➞ Embedded Librarian
"... students perform better in the courses that are designed with a high level of collaboration between librarians and faculty as compared to the courses with minimal faculty-librarian collaboration."
What IS an embedded librarian?
Basically, what this means is a specific librarian is with your class for the entire semester and available at the point of need in addition to scheduled opportunities. An embedded librarian is actually in Blackboard along with you and your students. The experience is whatever you and the librarian you are collaborating with want it to be.
Some things an embedded librarian might do include:
- Provide synchronous or asynchronous instruction
- Provide individual student consultations
- Create a "Library Resources" section in the course that include information literacy resources such as a course guide and the plagiarism tutorial.
How can embedding a librarian in my class help students learn information literacy skills?
Just like faculty are experts in their respective fields and have different specialties, information literacy is a librarian's specialty. When you embed a librarian in your class, there are more opportunities for a librarian to help students continue to grow and improve their information literacy skills. This is important because:
- The information literacy skills taught in high school can be quite different from what's expected at the academic level. For example, high school students can struggle when given the freedom to choose a topic when given a college assignment because in high school, many times students are required to choose a topic from a pre-approved list. Academic librarians can teach students how to choose and narrow a topic.
- For K12 students, research often means "reportage", finding information to confirm their ideas or finding the answer then reporting it. Academic librarians can help college students learn that research is really about adding to the scholarly community by developing meaningful research questions that explore areas that have gaps in the research field.
- Much of the citation work students do in high school is with MLA. Often they do not even know there are other styles. Academic librarians can teach students the various citation styles.