Librarian Design Share

When Gail Schaub, Cara Cadena, Patricia Bravender, and Christopher Kierkus, surveyed 750 students at Grand Valley State University, one thing was clear: the language of information literacy can be complex and confusing. To combat misunderstandings, Gail began a collaboration with graphic arts professor Vinicius Lima where students would create visual representations and definitions of frequently used information literacy and library terms. The resulting campaign–Learn the Terms–resulted in some beautiful work by student artists, Stephen Dobrzynski, Jacob Luettke, Micah Martin, Carissa Storms. You can read more about this amazing collaboration and view all of the resulting artwork via the Grand Valley State University’s Open Teaching Tools.

Here’s Gail describing this collaborative project:

The “Learn the Terms” campaign was the result of a study I did with colleagues. We discovered in a survey of over 750 students on campus (a representative sampling), that 50% of our students don’t know the meanings of words they hear regularly in classrooms and on syllabi, terms like scholarly, peer-review, and even journal.

 We published our findings, but I knew that  we had to let others know, and offer some kind of solution. I collaborated with Vinicius Lima, a professor of graphic arts here, and his students created these designs that we’ve since produced and are sharing in the library and beyond. The designs are in our institutional repository for sharing:http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/oer_teaching/2/

There’s a new group of students working on designs for a new list of eight terms for creation in the coming year. It’s been an incredible experience, being part of the design thinking process with these students, and I’m so enamored by their work, I want to show everyone I possibly can.

We can’t wait to see what new designs this year’s students develop!