Skip to Main Content

Library Academic Support for Faculty: Instruction Support

Collaboration on Research Assignments

Librarians can:

  • Help you design an assignment.
  • Test the assignment and determine if resources are available.
  • Discuss what databases and reference materials are available.
  • Develop a research strategy for the assignment.
  • Identify the best and/or newest information resources for your course goals.
  • Collaborate on developing a library course guide.
  • Provide course-related library instruction on specific resources and research strategies.
  • Provide individual research consultations for your students.
  • Give feedback about pitfalls or problems encountered after the assignment is finished.

Library staff can:

Faculty can:

  • Meet with a librarian at the beginning of a semester to go over the syllabus and assignments.
  • Provide copies of assignments to the reference librarians.
  • Talk with a librarian about strategies to avoid plagiarism.
  • Consider putting some materials on Reserve.
  • Work with a librarian on an assessment tool.
  • Break research assignments into manageable pieces with checkpoints along the way.
  • Encourage students to find scholarly material through the article databases available on the library website and cite them properly.
  • Include the evaluation, analysis, and application of information as part of the research process.
  • Clarify terminology with students (ex: magazine, journal, peer-reviewed) (ex: library database vs. Web).
  • Arrange for a librarian to visit your classroom for a portion of a class (or schedule your class to visit the library) for a specific purpose (ex: demo a specific database; show how to do alerts or rss feeds from library databases; demo how to use an online citation manager; teach APA or MLA citation styles; etc.).