Juggling the value of performance-based assessment of student information literacy competencies with the limited time and resources required to do this type of assessment remains an ongoing challenge for many librarians.This article chronicles our initial foray into content analysis, a fairly labor-intensive methodology, but one which allowed us to examine student approaches to the research process as narrated in their own words in the form of a prefocus essay. Our goal was to gather data that would help to inform our university library’s information literacy curriculum. What follows documents our process, methodology, results, and lessons learned in order to aid those at other institutions in their assessment planning.Colgate University is a selective, private liberal arts institution with an approximate student body of 2,900. The information literacy program is well-established, with an on-going presence in the Core Curriculum and First-Year Seminar courses, as well as frequent requests for library instruction in upper-level courses.
In 2016, Colgate University Libraries began converting their static HTML website to the Drupal platform. This article outlines the process librarians used to complete this project using only in-house resources and minimal funding. For libraries and similar institutions considering the move to a content management system, this case study can provide a starting point and highlight important issues.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.