Comprehensive first-year infolit curriculum.

The University Library teaches a first year level University Course, UC 170, “Digital Research in the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, or Humanities; Critical concepts and strategies.” As described in the course catalog, “This one-credit, hands-on course will help students lay a solid foundation for success in all current and future academic research. With an emphasis on the wealth of digital resources now available, the material focuses on information discovery and management skills, expands knowledge of scholarly sources, and promotes critical thinking.” The course is taught in the University Library Instructional Center. (Separate sections are taught for each of these divisions.)

Goals:

• Students should exit the course with familiarity with the library and its services, have established a relationship with one librarian, and have achieved a comfort level with approaching other librarians as needed.

• Students should have familiarity with electronic databases related to one large academic division and have developed some information literacy skills associated with assessing the quality of information obtained via the Internet.

• Students should have acquired research skills to apply to specific projects.

Assessment:

NA

Enriching scholarship via annual training event.

This workshop series, held each May, offers pedagogical and hands-on skill building sessions for faculty and other instructors. Library leadership was a key factor in the creation of the campus-wide UM Teaching and Technology Collaborative. The Collaborative sponsors this week-long series of workshops designed to help faculty explore how technology can facilitate effective teaching and learning. May 2008 will mark the tenth anniversary of this highly successful technology instruction initiative. Last year, over 500 participants registered for one or more of the 130 sessions, with 1858 total registrations. Of the 85 presenters, 21 were Library staff who taught 36 of the sessions.
http://www.umich.edu/~teachtec/es.html

Goals:

• To collaborate with other units on campus to promote use of technology in teaching.

• To educate faculty in using those technologies.

• To promote collaboration and discussion among faculty and other instructors who incorporate use of technology in their teaching, or who desire to do so.

Assessment:

NA

Library Sakai project enriches course experiences; collaboration with academic faculty.

The Sakaibrary Project Sakai is a free and open source online collaboration and learning environment. CTools, Michigan’s local branded installation of Sakai, is tailored to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, and support for portfolios and research collaboration. The Sakaibrary project is a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Indiana University, initially funded by the Mellon Foundation, to develop open source software tools to integrate access to library licensed digital content within the Sakai collaboration and learning environment. Students and faculty can thus utilize these resources easily within the context of a course. Specific developments that place access to librarians, library resources, and library services directly within CTools include:

• A librarian role that allows faculty to make a librarian an active member of the course site, with the ability to participate in online discussions and to add resources to the site;

• An AskUs button that faculty can add to a course site to give students one-click reference help;

• A citation linker, which allows faculty to add titles directly to a course site;

• And automatic addition of course reserve lists to a course site.
  http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sakai/

Goals:

See above

Assessment:

NA

MBooks Google project revolutionizes access to immense holdings.

MBooks is the result of the ground-breaking partnership between The University of Michigan and Google, Inc., to digitize the entire print collection of the University Library. The digitized materials are searchable in the library catalog, Mirlyn, as well as in Google Book Search; we already provide full-text access to well over a hundred thousands public domain works, and make it possible to search for keywords and phrases within hundreds of thousands of more in-copyright materials. Though controversial, we believe that this project is altering the way we do research, and is changing the world for the better. It enables the Library to build on and reconceive vital Library services for the new millennium. In one example, we have worked with the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities to provide access to this great and growing library for visually impaired students.
http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp

Goals:

See above

Assessment:

NA