BEAM Me Up is a one-shot session that works well in addition to a search strategies class, but can be done without. This session asks students to use the BEAM framework coined by Joseph Bizup to organize and synthesize research materials to create a complex and well-supported argument. Rather than evaluated sources using a checklist, the instructor using BEAM asks students to consider how the information will be used (and to consider how authors use information to build arguments). Adaptors may want to replace the sources given here with ones relevant to the students' curriculum. Our students are asked to create an argument that considers the city they live in, i.e. Memphis. I chose Stax Records because of its rich history locally and nationally, and because of its importance to the civil rights movement. I wanted to use a topic the students would find interesting and chose a variety of source types that I hoped would engage them both personally and intellectually. With credit to Brannen Varner, Michael Harris, and Joel Roberts.

In this activity, students learn how to locate and select appropriate primary sources for their assignment using library guides (libguides) and the library databases list. Students then analyze an example primary source to improve their primary sources literacy.

This low-stakes, in-class assignment is designed to help first-year seminar students learn about important library resources and present their findings to their fellow students. In teams, students complete a series of authentic research tasks (called challenges) such as selecting and citing images from our digital collection and using our discovery tool to find books on the library shelves. Each team is also assigned a unique challenge to learn more about the library. Students spend the last twenty-five minutes of class designing a quick presentation in Canva and using it to teach each other about what they learned through their unique challenges.

Student select a company and complete very simple analysis of income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements

The goal of this activity is to explore spaces, services, and information literacy (IL) concepts through problem-based scenarios, guided discovery, and peer teaching. Ideal for orientations for K-12, undergraduate, transfer, or graduate students, but can also be used for instruction requests with no clear research assignment or at the start of a research project. Students work in groups to find solutions to a scenario using guided directions and tools, and then teach the rest of the class based on their findings. The activity takes approximately 30-45 minutes, including student presentations, depending on class size and complexity of scenarios.

Each year, I host an Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon and I often get students who are new to Wikipedia editing, as well as students who show up for class credit. To help engage students in different activities on Wikipedia, I created the following BINGO cards. These can be used by instructors or event organizers in any way that fits your approach to edit-a-thons. I always provide instruction and an Art+Feminism research and event guide to help everyone get started editing. These BINGO cards are especially useful for new editors and content creators.

Students self-reflect on ways in which they do research and create knowledge. This is a discussion topic in an online library research class. My students are mostly adult learners with full-time jobs.

A two-credit online undergraduate information literacy course used in an adult degree completion bachelor's program.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.

This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.