Information Literacy Partner of the Month

Every day, we are inundated with vast amounts of information. A 24-hour news cycle and thousands of global television and radio networks, coupled with an immense array of online resources, have challenged our long-held perceptions of information management. . . . We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. . . . In addition to the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, it is equally important that our students are given the tools required to take advantage of the information available to them. The ability to seek, find, and decipher information can be applied to countless life decisions, whether financial, medical, educational, or technical.

Mike has consistently had me embedded as a faculty librarian in his Local Environmental History class for YEARS now. . . . I am not only embedded in the MyClasses sense, but I also attend every class session (just like he himself does as the primary instructor) and throughout the semester he spends weekly class time deferring to me as the faculty librarian - asking about library resources, online resources, ways to go about finding that information that he had just mentioned or gone over in class, etc. . . . Mike consistently approaches me in the summer/winter with rough syllabi in hand, asking for feedback on an assignment that he is mulling over creating, or else he sets a meeting time with me and we talk about it in person. . . . Once his program became a full-fledged department, he was first in line to talk about creating an Information Literacy agreement with us, to truly formalize how his entire cadre of folks goes about working with us. As his department is filled with folks who started off their lives as sociologists, geographers, economists, philosophers, history faculty, etc. - you can imagine how invaluable this is! We don’t have anything in place yet, but he's strongly advocating for one. . . . And lastly - he **constantly** directs students my way - all semester!