What are your librarians up to? Turns out, it’s a lot of teaching!

This is a guest post by librarians, Jessica Thorlakson and Janice Kung

The University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) is a strong supporter of teaching and information literacy. In 2018, your library staff taught approximately 667 sessions with approximately 17,542 library users. That’s a lot of people!

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

One of the best ways to do this is through the collaboration between professors/instructors and subject librarians. Librarians come into classes and provide relevant library and information literacy instruction that are customized to meet the learning outcomes of the course. These are “course based” instructional sessions and can cover everything from effectively searching databases for literature, citation manager tools, research metrics, research data management, and more.

However, UAL also offers many “non-course based” instructional sessions, those not connected to specific UAlberta courses. These provide additional opportunities to pick up other information literacy skills or additional topics relevant to research or campus life, such as how to manage a unique identifier for your researcher profile (e.g. ORCID), identifying predatory publishers, and systematic review searching.

In the visualizations below, you can see some of our instruction statistics from 2013-2018.

The fall term sees the largest influx of new students, so naturally it is the library’s busiest month for instruction, as we reach out to our users and provide an orientation about our services and resources. While much of our instruction is considered “course based” (in fact, 72% of all library instruction is embedded within the curriculum), the non-course based sessions offer greater flexibility so the library can provide more in-depth sessions on a variety of topics, such as the monthly three-hour training sessions on systematic review searching.

We look forward to another busy, library instruction year with all of you. If you are looking for some library instruction for your class, try contacting your subject librarian.