What Does an Information Literate Salve Graduate Look Like?
by Dawn Emsellem-Wichowski, director of library services
One of McKillop Library’s primary roles is to help Salve students to become information literate. At the end of their four years, our goal is for graduates entering their professions to be able to identify crucial research questions in their day-to-day work, know how to ask them, master where to best seek answers, and understand how to evaluate the credibility and quality of the answers they find.
Salve students pursuing graduate degrees need advanced research skills to excel in graduate school, including how to ask increasingly complex questions as they conduct the longer-term research that upper-level degrees demand. We want them to expertly leverage library tools like databases and catalogs, as well as open web tools like Google and Google Scholar to engage in the scholarly conversation.
In accordance with Salve Regina's mission, graduates should become responsible and ethical consumers and creators of information and understand their role in the vast, constantly evolving information landscape. They should understand their duties as citizens in an information drenched society, using credible information to continue to learn and work toward a world that is harmonious, just, and merciful.
Reaching this goal will require close coordination with committees refining the core curriculum, departments working on departmental curricula, and individual faculty members who are developing or refining class assignments. Librarians using the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, the AAC&U Value Rubric for Information Literacy, and accreditation standards for individual disciplines can help departments integrate information literacy into key classes so that students can build upon content knowledge and skills as they acquire them. They can also help faculty members build information literacy assessment into their courses and curricula, and to develop effective information literacy assignments so that students learn the skills they need to become effective, efficient and ethical consumers and creators of information.
Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access Textbooks (OAT)
by John Lewis, collection services librarian
Salve Regina University has pledged to participate in the Open Textbook Initiative with other Rhode Island colleges and universities. This decision was made to support the university’s mission to make it easier for students of all financial backgrounds to afford college and succeed academically. As a part of this initiative, Salve Regina commits to help interested faculty adopt Open Educational Resources to replace paid materials, and to annually submit data about the adoption of open educational resources to compare our success with participating Rhode Island institutions. McKillop Library’s John Lewis is coordinating the Open Textbook Initiative at Salve Regina, and librarians are providing individual support and workshops for faculty.
On September 27, Governor Gina Raimondo launched the initiative, which aims to save college students $5 million a year by replacing traditional textbooks with openly licensed textbooks or other open educational resources. Exorbitant textbook prices have become a barrier to student success. Over the last decade, college textbook prices have increased by 88%. According to the College Board, undergraduates spend an average of $1200 on textbooks annually. Faced with these costs, many students choose to not buy a required text, take fewer courses, and some drop or fail a course completely.
OERs are teaching, learning and research materials that are free of copyright or license restrictions. Faculty members may choose to replace a paid textbook with a freely available textbook or with a series of OERs. These freely available materials can be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed, providing an opportunity to move away from traditional textbook-based instruction and explore alternative methods of instruction.
To support this effort, on Wednesday, March 22 at 2:00p.m. in Room 106 (McKillop Library) an introductory workshop will be held on locating and evaluating high-quality peer-reviewed OER and OA texts to incorporate into lessons, exams and assignments. To gather baseline data, we ask faculty members to complete this short survey on current use and knowledge of OER and Open Access Textbooks.
Start Survey
Archives
by Genna Duplisea, university archivist and special collections librarian
Professors can work with the library to create and curate student work in the university’s institutional repository, Digital Commons. Throughout the semester, the class’s embedded librarian(s) will provide instruction on scholarly communication, copyright, and metadata so that students can upload papers, presentations, or other projects to the repository.
There are opportunities for students whose major departments offer internship credit and who are interested in archives work. Possible internship projects could include organizing and describing image and document collections, entering photographic data into Shared Shelf, digitization, managing the Archives’ communications, or another project developed between the student, archivist, and academic department.
Additionally, the Archives is soliciting materials from Salve Regina students, staff, and faculty who attended the Women’s Marches in January to begin a collection on activism in the Salve community.
Offices and departments interested in sending records to the Archives can contact the archivist for pickup or send materials through campus mail. All transfers must be accompanied by a completed and signed transfer form to both transfer custody and assist in the description of the records. Records are organized by originating unit of the university, thereby detailed information from that original office is vital. Please contact Genna Duplisea at 401-341-272 or genna.duplisea@salve.edu for more information.
Diversity Display
This year McKillop Library started a new monthly display to promote inclusiveness and understanding on our campus. Every month on a table outside the Bookends Café, librarians take turns creating a themed display, such as this month’s celebrating Women's History Month. So far this year we have also had displays for Hispanic Heritage Month, LGBTQ History Month, Native American History Month, Life in Canada, Black History Month, and Diversity in Children’s Literature.
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Archives Update
During the fall 2016 semester, the Archives began publishing its image collection in Shared Shelf Commons. More photographs and media will appear as digitization efforts continue over the next year. So far, the Archives has published media in the following collections:
Archives Photographs
Property and Architecture Images
The Archives has also published new or completed existing collections in Digital Commons, the university’s institutional repository for documents and original research:
Commencement programs
University catalogs
World Share Management Services
The McKillop Library is excited to announce the completed roll out of the new integrated library system called World Share Management Services (WMS).
As is usual with a new system, we anticipate a learning curve as we become more familiar with all that this new service can do. We encourage you to "Ask-a- librarian" in order to quickly learn the best method for your research.
WMS Features include:
*Our online catalog “Discovery” has a new, clean look and easy search.
*Filtering process that makes research easy, quick to drill down to comprehensive results.
*New Course Reserves: No longer need a "course password" for streaming video.
*Log into your library account for access to library resources using your Salve email user name and password.
*Our new system supports requesting material from other HELIN libraries.
*World Cat option lets you search worldwide catalogs.
Library Website Has a New Look!
The website has been updated to accommodate the new library system which has made much of the information on our old website out of date. The new website has the look and feel of the university’s website and continues to connect you to the library’s resources as easily as possible.
Included in the update was moving the website to a new server, adding services from third party providers and blending the services together to provide a uniform site.
This has been a "live" update and is still in progress with a completion date of this summer. When completed, the website will be easily navigable on any device.
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