Library Instruction Program

  • Students and Faculty in class listening to a lecture
    Programmatic Information Literacy

    Information Literacy refers to the ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and effectively use this information. This is increasingly important in light of rapid technological change, proliferating information resources, and multiple media.

    Champlain College has identified and embraced Information Literacy as one of its 12 college-wide competencies. The Library helped develop the Information Literacy competency based on national standards and theoretical frameworks, including the Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. The competency is used as a guide for our teaching and for student assessment across the college.

    Champlain’s information literacy program is unique in a number of ways. Our program is an incremental information literacy program embedded in Champlain’s Core curriculum. Like the Core, our curriculum is inquiry-based. As an embedded program, librarians see all of our on-campus students at least four times during their first three years. And, we provide a common, sequential curriculum that emphasizes ways of knowing and asking in addition to library-focused content.

    Description of All Programmatic Information Literacy Sessions

Bibliographic and Digital Methods Instruction Sessions

Faculty may arrange for a librarian to meet with their class to provide an instruction session on how to find and use resources and tools that will be useful for projects in the course. This type of course-integrated instruction is typically quite useful because the instruction occurs at the time that students need it, and relates that instruction to projects or assignments in the course.

Faculty should contact Nick Faulk, Head of Information & Digital Literacy, at nfaulk@champlain.edu with more information about their class, the content they would like to see covered, and their preferred date of the session (please provide at least one-week advance notice).

Instruction sessions might cover the use of any of a range of library research and digital scholarship tools or information literacy habits.

Sample Instruction Sessions

  • Catalog searching for books in the Children’s Literature collection.
  • Creating digital text analysis dashboards with Voyant Tools.
  • Finding and using subject-specific databases for Marketing research.
  • Getting started with ArcGIS Storymaps, including locating freely-available GIS data for maps.
  • Identifying key voices and forms of authority in research for social services settings.

Special Collections Instruction

If you are interested in integrating primary, historical source literacy into your class, the library is piloting multiple potential models for Special Collections instruction in the 2024-2025 academic year. If you are interested in joining the pilot, email specialcollections@champlain.edu. In your message, please provide information the types of historical sources or information skills you would like to integrate into your class.