Getting InfoLIT in the Archives: Teaching Inquiry-Driven Research Practice in a University Archive
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation (20 minute presentation)
Target Audience
Higher Education
Location
PARB 255
Proposal
How can we take information literacy instruction and place it into new contexts, such as a university archive? This presentation will explore the collaboration between a subject librarian and archivist instruction librarian which brought information literacy teaching and inquiry-driven research out of the regular library classroom and into the archives. Presenters will share their process of co-developing an active lesson alongside faculty that allowed students to explore archival religious texts and develop their ideas and questions into viable research questions for a sensory objects in religion course.
Critical to the planning and development of this lesson was the librarians’ use of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This lesson allows students to actively engage with the idea of “research as inquiry” through an open exploration of primary source material and interest-driven questioning that is then formulated into a complex, research-guiding question. By bringing students into a space rich with historical and religious documents, students can participate in the curiosity-driven excitement of inquiry-based research. Further library sessions help students break down the scope of their research questions to manageable research pathways and introduce strategies to both access and respond to existing scholarly conversations surrounding their topic. Through this lesson students become more critical users of primary source materials and further develop their practice of information literacy dispositions for performing scholarly research.
While this lesson used religious texts, which are commonly found in university archives, the framework of this lesson can be easily adapted to explore archival material within other disciplines.
Presentation Description
This presentation describes the continued collaboration between a subject librarian and archivist librarian who designed a library session that engages students with primary source materials and inquiry-based research practices. By bringing a library instruction class into the archives, students had a rich and structured environment to explore a diverse range of religious texts and develop their own set of interesting, manageable, and original research questions.
Session Goals
Our goal for this session is to communicate an adaptable active learning lesson structure that encourages collaboration between subject and archivist librarians to teach information literacy skills in new settings.
Keywords
Archives, special collections, primary sources, collaboration, inquiry-based research
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Ornat, Natalie and Beem, Randi, "Getting InfoLIT in the Archives: Teaching Inquiry-Driven Research Practice in a University Archive" (2020). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 27.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2020/2020/27
Getting InfoLIT in the Archives: Teaching Inquiry-Driven Research Practice in a University Archive
PARB 255
How can we take information literacy instruction and place it into new contexts, such as a university archive? This presentation will explore the collaboration between a subject librarian and archivist instruction librarian which brought information literacy teaching and inquiry-driven research out of the regular library classroom and into the archives. Presenters will share their process of co-developing an active lesson alongside faculty that allowed students to explore archival religious texts and develop their ideas and questions into viable research questions for a sensory objects in religion course.
Critical to the planning and development of this lesson was the librarians’ use of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This lesson allows students to actively engage with the idea of “research as inquiry” through an open exploration of primary source material and interest-driven questioning that is then formulated into a complex, research-guiding question. By bringing students into a space rich with historical and religious documents, students can participate in the curiosity-driven excitement of inquiry-based research. Further library sessions help students break down the scope of their research questions to manageable research pathways and introduce strategies to both access and respond to existing scholarly conversations surrounding their topic. Through this lesson students become more critical users of primary source materials and further develop their practice of information literacy dispositions for performing scholarly research.
While this lesson used religious texts, which are commonly found in university archives, the framework of this lesson can be easily adapted to explore archival material within other disciplines.
