Stewart Library Information Literacy Team

 2003/2004 Annual Report

July 1, 2003 to June 20, 2004

Overview

The Stewart Library information program supports the Weber State University mission and the Stewart Library mission.  The program has been developed to comply with ACRL and AAHE's national standards and ACRL's best practices guidelines. 

The team, over the past year, has continued its use of the assessment plans developed last year for each type of information literacy instruction we provide. Faculty members have included assessment information in their Faculty Annual Reports.. Assessment of the English 2010 exercise has resulted in a new professionally designed exercise for each student in our most often presented information literacy sessions. The information literacy team completed over 185 course integrated sessions this year, up 27% from 2002/2003. 

The following goals were met by the Information Literacy Team in the 2003-2004 academic year:

Members of the information literacy team include Faculty: Art Carpenter, Evan Christensen, Carol Hansen, Joan Hubbard, JaNae Kinikin, Wade Kotter, Kathy Payne, Shaun Spiegel and Carey Sydney (from April 15 to July 8) and Staff: Brianna Beckstrand, Lonna Rivera,  Don Trottier (beginning Spring 2004) and Fran Zedney. The annual report is compiled from minutes of team meetings and from data supplied in the Faculty Activity Reports and from team members.  The minutes of each team meeting are available on the team intranet. Team member's are heartily congratulated for their active engagement in team activities and for all of their many accomplishments this year.

Information Literacy Data

The following table illustrates the data collected on instruction sessions provided:

Course Integrated Instruction by College:

English 2010 and FYE sessions are excluded from the table above. The data above is collected by the Library Office Specialist or staff, from the new Library Instruction Database. Data for this report was extracted on June 20th and may change by July 1.

Information Literacy Competency Exam Data

The following table illustrates the data on exams:

This data is collected by Carole Lapine, TBE Department. Summer and Fall 2003 data will be added in July 2004.

Scholarship

	Lombardo, Nancy and Carol Hansen, “So Many Meetings, So Little Time: Using IP Videoconferencing to Revitalize Statewide Committees. Libres: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal 14.1 (March 2004).
	Spiegel, S., & Kinikin, J. (2004, May). "Promoting Geographic Information System usage across campus." Computers in Libraries, 10-16.
	[Submitted November 2003. Accepted for review in April 2004 and the revision is in progress awaiting instructions from the editor.] Spiegel, Shaun, Lauren Fowler and Carol Hansen, "Using Selected Assessment Data to Information Literacy Program Planning with Campus Partners" under revision, returned with comments to prepare for publication in Research Strategies. [peer reviewed]

	National/International Presentations Hansen, Carol. Imagining the Future: Creating a Shared Vision for Information Literacy in Washington, Workshop for 95 community and technical college librarians in Washington, Lake Washington Community College, Seattle, April 9, 2004. Invited by Deb Gilchrist and Washington state community college information literacy committee. Spiegel, S., and Durkee, D. Incorporating Information Literacy into the Accounting Curriculum. Presented at the British Accounting Association Education Special Interest Group Annual Conference, May 26-28, 2004. Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland.
	State/Regional Presentations Hansen, Carol, Shaun Spiegel and Nan Allsen. Practical Applications of Assessment: A K-20 Dialogue, Utah Library Association, May 6, 2004 Spiegel, S., & Goebel Brown, A. Is Factiva Giving You a Headache? Presented at the Utah Library Association Annual Conference, Ogden, UT, May 2004.
	On Campus Presentations Carpenter, Art. Presentation on the Stewart Library at the WSU New Faculty Retreat, Snowbird August 2003. Hansen, Carol and Shaun Spiegel. Student Services and Information Literacy, Student Services department heads, November 3, 2003 Hansen, Carol and Shaun Spiegel. Student Services and Information Literacy, for 40 Student Services staff members, November 20, 2003

Spiegel, S. “Incorporating Information Literacy into the Accounting Curriculum: Presentation at the British Accounting Association Education Special Interest Group.” Weber State University Research, Scholarship, & Professional Growth (RS&PG), May 2004, $709.

Our major challenge from the past two years, lack of staff, remains our largest ongoing challenge.  Demand for course integrated instruction sessions has increased 27% in the past year. We have taught over 400 more students in our for credit courses this year than we did last year. Faculty across campus are increasingly interested in working with librarians to improve the information literacy skills of their students, at the basic level and in the major. Information literacy is seen as an important pedagogy to increase student learning, student writing and critical thinking. The information literacy initiative offers very strong support for the Undergraduate Research in student's upper division courses. 

As demand for our program continues to grow, on all levels, we have had an extremely difficult time recruiting new faculty. With Jill's/Ruby's position still unfilled, Carey's resignation and Carol's leave of absence, the IL team is increasingly understaffed. Hiring new faculty members is critically important to maintain our goals for IL across the curriculum. Another full time position is desperately needed to meet the needs of all the colleges, especially Arts and Humanities which is the largest user of our program. The next two years offer a great opportunity for team members to share their leadership talents with the team and to hopefully bring in new faculty and staff from inside and outside the library to the continue building the Information Literacy initiative at WSU and beyond. Other major challenges for the future include working more closely with the local school districts and the Applied Technology Colleges in better training and coordination IL instruction from K-12 to college.

Another major challenge has been the continued lack of programming and graphic arts assistance within the library.  We still lack on site support but we have been diligent in finding excellent assistance for graphic arts and programming from outside the library. Until December of this year the team was still required to use the insecure online SNAP student end of course evaluation system. Luckily, through finding outside assistance ( Chitester staff) we finally migrated to a new more secure online student end of course evaluation. Again this year, the library information literacy team could greatly benefit from more programming assistance. If it were available we would not have to continually hunt for outside help. We hope the  3/4 time Web development position will be able to devote time to meet some of the programming/graphics/media needs of the information literacy team.