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Information Literacy & Instruction

All about D'Amour information literacy and instructional program.

D'Amour Library has a robust information literacy program that includes first-year, discipline-specific and graduate instruction.

Goals of the program are to develop in Western New England students:

  • The ability to access relevant sources to fit an information need.
  • The ability to critically evaluate information and its origins to satisfy an information need.
  • The ability to use information in an ethical and legal manner.

To schedule library instruction for a class, please contact us at dref@wne.edu.

Each undergraduate student will be exposed to three-four library instruction sessions during their first year in the First Year Seminar and English 133 courses. These sessions address the Information Literacy general university requirement by providing a foundation for all incoming students to understand how to use the library's information resources, develop strategies for evaluating information for reliability and creditability, and use information in an ethical and legal manner.

As information literacy is a critical thinking skill that spans all disciplines and develops over time and through multiple exposures, the information literacy program for first year students is an interdisciplinary effort to lay a foundation of basic skills and concepts which students will build upon throughout college.

The sequenced modules work off of each other to address progressively complex aspects of information literacy:

  • Modules A & B, "Evaluating Information" and "Strategic Searching," are delivered through the First Year Seminar course in the fall semester.
  • Modules C & D, "From Context to Analysis: Using Specific Tools for Specialized Information Research" along with a research lab are presented in conjunction with the English 133 course in the spring semester.

In addition to the library instruction sessions provided during the First Year Program, D’Amour Library offers curated instruction services in a variety of formats to upper-level and discipline-specific courses on an as-needed basis.

The instruction team looks forward to working with you to develop useful instruction sessions, tutorials, and research guides that can address several topics including:

  • Subject-specific research using library databases and professional resources
  • Finding sources for a literature review
  • Primary source research
  • Media literacy