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CUL’s Role in Teaching and Learning

Recently, Sarah Thomas received a survey sent to all Association of Research Libraries (ARL) directors from the Task Force on Library Roles for Teaching and Learning. The survey asked that each library submit a brief description of its efforts and the activities of its librarians in these new roles. The response that CUL prepared was so impressive in the initiative it has shown that Sarah felt the staff should share in seeing our accomplishments. The following is an edited version of that response.

1.  New roles that your organization is assuming (or has assumed) in teaching and learning. We are especially interested in learning about those activities that embed the library into the mainstream teaching and learning activities of the university. We also are very interested in identifying practices and model programs that are transportable, sustainable, and scalable.

Academic staff in the Cornell Library are involved a variety of teaching and instruction arrangements that are, for the most part, aimed at ensuring that information fluency competencies—the skills for scholarly and professional research, information evaluation, management, and communication—are integrated into the curriculum and reach Cornell students at all levels. These include teaching or co-teaching for-credit courses, course-integrated instruction sessions, and workshops. Although the data for 2005-2006 have not yet been compiled, library staff held over 1,100 instruction sessions and workshops reaching over 18,700 participants in 2004-2005.

Several for-credit courses are taught or co-taught by Library staff each year. The list of such courses that were offered in 2005-2006 includes:

  • Bioinformatic Tools for Genomics. Sponsored by Professor John Schimenti and organized by Medha Devare, the life sciences librarian at Mann Library; attended by thirty-two students. It provided an introduction to Web-based tools and databases useful in the analysis and interpretation of a variety of genome-related data. Feedback from the students was very positive, and the department is interested in having this course taught on a regular basis.
  • Technology Skills for Union Activists. Co-taught at Onondaga Community College to six students in the Labor Studies Certificate Program by lecturer Christina Homrighouse in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) and ILR librarian Debra Lamb-Deans. 
  • Lawyering. Six law librarians team with six writing instructors to teach in fall and spring semesters. It introduces first-year students to lawyering skills, emphasizing legal writing, analysis, and research.
  • Physics II: Heat/Electromagnetism (I). Pat Viele, a physical sciences librarian, collaborated with a visiting faculty instructor to incorporate an Internet literacy component. This involved providing weekly assignments to the twenty-four prospective undergraduate students in the 2005 six-week summer session and following up with short discussion and lecture sessions at the end of each week.
  • Information Literacy for the Physical Scientist. An introduction to physical science information research methods taught in the spring semester by Leah Solla, a chemistry reference librarian, with sessions by other librarians.
  • Advanced Legal Research. A seminar co-taught by three law librarians that covers cutting-edge research techniques to prepare students for practice in the law office of the future. It focuses on desktop electronic legal research.
  • Research Strategies. This course introduced students with research interests in Latino Studies to search strategies and methods for finding materials in various formats. Both the Asian American and Native American Studies programs have expressed interest in cross-listing this course in the near future.
  • HR Online Research and Reporting Methods for Executive Decision-Making. Started in 1997, this course was co-taught by Professor John Boudreau and ILR senior reference librarian Stuart Basefsky but is now taught by Stuart alone. It is designed to develop key HR competencies and skills for researching and presenting information necessary for executive decision making.
  • Advanced Legal Research: International and Foreign Law. This course was taught by law librarian Thomas Mills in the fall and spring.
  • Advanced Legal Research: U. S. Legal Research for LL.M. Students. Law librarian Pat Court introduces LL.M. students each semester to basic legal research in U.S. materials that will be valuable to them in their course work at Cornell and in practice.
  • Law Practice Technology. Law librarian Julie Jones introduced students to a variety of technologies and software applications they will use in the practice of law integrated with advanced legal research strategies.

Library instructors also provide numerous course-integrated instruction sessions either in the classroom or in the library at the invitation of faculty and instructors. Curators in the Rare and Manuscripts Division alone average between 75 and 100 class sessions each year ranging from Shakespeare: Staging Women to Social Welfare as a Social Institution to The Solar System: Planets, Satellites, and Rings (I) to Seminar in Historiography in architecture. All incoming MBA students in the Johnson School take Managerial Finance, for which the library instruction team prepares a case study for a recent merger-and-acquisition event that includes a review of key financial resources. Librarians in the Music Library and Olin Library worked with a professor to create specialized library learning projects for a first-year writing seminar, Jazz, Fusion Jazz, and Society. Library instructors have made a special effort to reach instructors of first-year writing seminars.

2.  Innovative ways in which your organization has enhanced the physical or technological environment to support teaching and learning.

Several years ago the Library collaborated with the Faculty Advisory Board on Information Technology (FABIT), the Department of Computer Science, and Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) in an innovative facility—the Cornell Library Collaborative Learning Computer Laboratory, also known as (CL)3—located in the library, which was designed to support cooperative learning and instruction for multimedia development and software engineering. Cornell is one of the first academic institutions in the world to build a computer laboratory with the sole purpose of fostering collaboration. (CL)3 contains eight workstations that feature one CPU, two mice, two keyboards, and adjustable dual monitors. Additionally, all workstations are completely mobile through their wireless Internet connections and portable battery supplies. The lab has proven to be extremely popular for both public use and group-based classes such as an Introductory Programming Workshop, Game Design, and music theory.

The Library also supports high-end multimedia production facilities in several of the library units and has partnered with CIT to provide space for computer labs. Library staff teach workshops on a variety of technical topics including Web search engines, census data, geographic information systems, blogs, and RSS; the use of productivity tools such as RefWorks, EndNote, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and PowerPoint; and specific research tools such as the Bloomberg financial database.

To assist faculty who have important scholarly materials on floppy disks that are no longer readable or were created in word processing packages long obsolete, the Research and Assessment Services department of CUL also offers a free File Format and Media Migration Service.

CUL also established Digital Consulting and Production Services for developing digital collections in support of instructional and research activities. It has sponsored a series of faculty innovation grants to support the collaborative and creative use of resources through the creation of digital content of enduring value to the Cornell community and scholarship at large. Over the past three years, more than 200 cultural institutions from around the world have sent librarians, technologists, curators, and administrators to CUL to take part in one of the intensive week-long workshops on digital preservation management offered by the Department of Research Assessment Services. Participants have come from all continents save Antarctica to work on developing short-term strategies for coping with the long-term problems of keeping digital information accessible in the face of technology obsolescence. Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this workshop is being used to develop similar training programs in the UK and possibly in Canada and New Zealand. An award-winning tutorial available in both English and French complements the on-site training program.

Next: Get It! Cornell: Recent Improvements in CUL’s “Find” Services