Fall 2000 Library Newsletter

Role of Instruction on the Rise

Marquette’s instruction librarians support the university’s teaching, learning, and research goals. In 1999-2000 we reached over 7,000 students, faculty, and outside groups via over 500 activities, sessions, and orientations.

To meet the challenge of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources, Marquette libraries place great emphasis on instruction. Julie O’Keeffe, Coordinator of Instruction Services, and the Libraries’ Instruction Committee identified these priorities for the next few years:

• To improve and evaluate students’ information literacy skills;
• To provide greater support to faculty in identifying information sources for use in teaching and in integrating information literacy training into their curricula;
• To provide greater support to faculty in their areas of research.

Currently, the librarians' largest commitment is to the First Year English Program. Ten librarians and seven library staff conduct approximately 160 research workshops for English 001-002 students each year. The goals of the sessions are to: 1) orient students to university-level research tools; 2) assist students in learning skills to gauge the reliability of information found in articles and on the Web; and 3) demonstrate the critical thinking skills needed to successfully work through the intellectual issues they encounter while searching for information. Dr. Virginia Chappell, director of the program, says “The librarians’ willingness to tailor instruction in retrieval and evaluation specifically to the English 001-002 curriculum has given our students a tremendous boost in their ability to write papers that use outside sources.”