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The More Frames, The Better

Cindi Tysick, Head of Educational Services in the Research, Education and Outreach Unit of the University Libraries at the University at Buffalo used Canva to create posters to visually represent each of the frames of ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

frameworks

Cindi reveals her sneaky trick to teach the Framework and explains why you’ll find seven, rather than six, posters in her library:

By putting these posters around your library you can begin cementing the concepts into subconscious of students and faculty.  The posters can also be printed into a brochure format, which can be given to students and faculty during orientations, workshops, or library instruction.

When looking over the posters you’ll see that there is a seventh frame, “Information has Structure.”  Our Educational Services Team at the University at Buffalo Libraries felt that there were so many knowledge practices under “Searching as Strategic Exploration,” that maybe there were actually two frames hidden there.  After debating about it we thought that students needed to know that the strategy they employed should be based on the knowledge that the information sources they were exploring had a structure (i.e. controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, browsability, etc.) so we created the seventh frame.

We are finding that this simple way to define the frames are aiding us in the development of learning objectives and lesson plans.

big-poster-framework-structure

The Framework is always a hot topic, and these posters, with their eye-catching colors, images, and icons, certainly help visualize and conceptualize something that can be confusing to faculty, student, and even librarians. You can download all seven PDF posters from the Librarian Design Share Google Drive, and you can contact Cindi with any design-related questions.

 

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Visualizing the ACRL Framework for Students

We can’t really call the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education new anymore, but lots of us still need help in understanding what it all means.  And if we librarians need help, imagine how our students are feeling about the whole thing! The librarians at the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library at Bucknell University are working to make this easier on all of us with a series of posters about each frame.

Continue reading “Visualizing the ACRL Framework for Students” →

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Have You Heard About ACRL_LMAO?

ACRL-LMAOHave you heard about ACRL_LMAO? There’s a new Library Marketing and Outreach Interest Group in ACRL spearheaded by Virginia Alexander and Adam Haigh that’s all about sharing successes, failures, ideas and questions related to outreach and marketing efforts in academic libraries.

You can connect with ACRL_LMAO in three different ways:

Some fantastic conversations are already happening, and I’m eager to find out what else this group is up to in the next few months.

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Visualizing Research is Hard

I’ve been working on a poster for my institution’s ACRL Assessment in Action project for the past month or so and it’s easily been one one of the toughest things I’ve had to design EVER. With ALA and other summer conferences around the corner, I’m willing to bet there are plenty of librarians and library students in epic-poster-design-battle-mode at the moment. So let’s talk posters, research and pictures.

To sum up our AiA Project: The St. Mary’s College of Maryland team was interested in learning if faculty-librarian collaboration had an impact on students’ information literacy (IL) skill development in the First Year Seminar (FYS: a required course for all first year students). It was a multi-method assessment: student surveys, faculty surveys, librarian surveys, rubric-based assessment of student essays and faculty interviews. This made coming up with a poster design particularly challenging since there was simply SO MUCH INFORMATION to share.

After hearing from an AiA cohort member who was taking a really simple, conversational approach to designing her project poster, I knew that I wanted to try to replicate that approach as much as possible. There is only so much information you can take in from a poster, and I would much rather be talking to people about different aspects of my project than having them squinting at the text above my shoulder.

AiA-Poster-Draft-small

I still think the poster is kind of busy, but to be honest, I’m so tired of it right now that I’m willing to let it go through the AiA peer review process and worry about it next week. It still needs alignment adjustments, and I’m not totally sold on the white font on the blue background, but it’s something!

Here are the pieces I like best:

Methods: All of our assessment pieces were part of a greater whole, and took place at various points throughout the semester. I was inspired by other AiA colleagues who took a timeline approach to their methods section and thought this was a nice compromise.

methods

Research Question & Background: This was originally a long paragraph with background information about our First Year Seminar, our IL outcomes, and our assessment project. I decided that if someone really wanted the long story, they could visit our project website (which I’m in the process of developing) or just ask me more about it. I paired down the research description to the just the essential question and basic facts about the FYS and our involvement with it.

question

Results: This is just a portion of the results section, which was easily the most difficult section to develop. I’m still not totally pleased with it, but I wanted to try something other than bullet points and graphs. I don’t know if I did the right thing leaving out numbers and I may go back and change that, but again, I think if people want the finer details I can refer them to the project website with averages, t-test scores and correlation scores, right (I hope)?

results

What kind of posters are you working on for conferences this summer? What’s your approach to visualizing your research?

 

 

 

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