1. Teaching information literacy skills

Project Mentors: Anja Brunner (Reaxys), Damon Ridley (Reaxys) and anyone else who would like to support the project!

An area that we have been exploring at Elsevier and where we can learn a lot from users is teaching information literacy — at any level of education. We would like to hear from those of you who are thinking about novel ways to engage students in thinking about scientific information and the importance of knowing how to navigate, evaluate and use that information. You may be just beginning your training towards becoming an instructor or you may be a veteran in education with a lot of experience in managing the “roadblocks” to teaching fundamental information literacy skills. Better yet, both could work together on this project.

The Association of College and Research Libraries defines Information literacy as "a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” These skills are platform-agnostic so they must be generalized, independent of where information is searched and in which discipline the information is used. So what is the skill set that an individual must learn? How can these be taught within the context of how people already search, evaluate and use information? And how can available information management systems be used in the classroom setting to teach and foment these skills? You could:

(1) pick an information management system available to you (Reaxys, PubChem, SciFinder, Google) and develop lesson plans using that platform to give students hands-on experiences that teach the skills you consider important.

(2) develop the list of skills you consider important. Then pick two or more information management systems and compare and contrast how those skills lead to optimal information searching, evaluating and using in each platform.

To this end, allow us to bring to your attention a chapter written by Librarian Judith Currano where she discusses her experiences with and approach to teaching information literacy. You will find the document uploaded to this page. Another resource that might be of use is a webinar Currano did with Damon Ridley. The link to the recorded webinar is: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/9122161258764560642

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