Last week staff in Library Instruction Services heard the good news that two more of their instructional efforts were accepted into the PRIMO Database, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Instruction Section’s peer-reviewed collection of instructional materials. The purpose of PRIMO is to foster sharing of high quality digital resources to support academic librarians’ as they teach users how to find and evaluate information.
PRIMO now includes a total of four projects designed by Library Instruction Services:
This tool helps students turn their research question into a successful database search. Students often struggle with this first piece of the research process but good keyword selection is vital to bringing back relevant and useful resources.
Tip Jar posts, which have been featured on this blog before, use comics and video to introduce undergraduates to research strategies, resources and library services. They are shared through the News For Undergraduates blog, incorporated into course-specific research guides, and used during chat reference transactions.
This interactive tutorial helps students avoid unintentional plagiarism. Students learn what constitutes plagiarism, why it matters, and strategies for avoiding plagiarism such as quoting, paraphrasing and note-taking. The tutorial is assigned by faculty across campus who can upload a related quiz to their Blackboard course site. Libraries staff were also featured in a PRIMO Site of the Month interview discussing the tutorial’s design.
Understanding Citations Tutorial
This interactive tutorial helps students do research and avoid plagiarism by explaining the elements of a citation. At the end of the tutorial, students are able to discern between different types of citations (a journal article versus a book, for example) and recognize the elements of a citation so that they can build a proper citation for their own bibliography.
These resources are available through the Libraries website 24/7 for students who need help even when the Libraries aren’t open. They allow us to provide point of need instruction whatever the time of day and support us as we work with students on their research projects.
Catherine Hamer is the Associate Director for User Services at the University of Texas Libraries.