What’s art got to do with politics? Show me the evidence

Abstract

Faculty expect students to integrate appropriate sources for their assignments with a research component and rely on collaborations with library subject specialists to support student needs. Teaching students to build their information literacy skills by using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contributes to increasing their proficiency for college-level research. Aspects important to this endeavor are learning about academic literature, choosing topics and learning background information, and finding and evaluating sources. Students learn how to construct their own academic authority, how to insert themselves into the ongoing scholarly conversation, and that searching can be nonlinear and iterative. Collaboration with course faculty encourages students who tend to shy away from the library. Avoiding the library is not uncommon for students, who then struggle alone with elements of their assignment that require research help. Hence the classroom visibility of subject specialist work builds student awareness of the library and prompts them to be proactive when doing library research.