The “Open Access: Strategies and Tools for Life after College” workshop was developed to give students the tools to continue academic research after graduation. Students may not recognize that the library provides many electronic resources for their research that is automatically given to them during their enrollment; by acknowledging their privileged access to information, they are prepared to be responsible researchers beyond campus. The workshop was requested by international students who were concerned about losing access to LMU resources when they returned home.

The purpose of this activity is to inspire students to adopt structured methods when they explore and retrieve information. It is based on lab notebooking methods and on managing and documenting the flow of references in Zotero, a reference management software.

This short lesson introduces identifying search terms with a Koosh ball. The 10 minute activity can be used in one-shot instruction sessions or built in to credit bearing information literacy courses.

This lesson was developed for HIS484 (Topics in the History of Gender and
Sexuality/Pride in the time of HIV/AIDS) in the Spring of 2018. The students’ final assignment
culminated in a multimedia or digital research project on a topic of their choosing and heavily
relied on primary source and visual materials. This lesson focuses on how students, as content
curators and analysts, can engage in deeper analysis and contextualization of the sources they
present through their projects. Students collectively analyzed one example from a particular

This lesson, created for English 2010, or Argumentative Writing, teaches students how to use library databases and keywords in order to focus their research topics. Most students come prepared with a general or broad topic in mind, but they need to narrow their focus in order to get more relevant search results. Here they simultaneously learn to search in and use the library databases and to focus their research topics.

During this activity, students work in small groups to explore assigned databases and then share back what they learn in a Google Doc projected at the front of the classroom.

In this lesson students view a series of short videos about searching library resources, interspersed with exercises in which they conduct searches on their topics and reflect on what they find and on the research process. (The first two videos and accompanying activities are done outside of class; the third can be done in class.)

Lesson plan for a 1-hour introductory Communication Studies theory class. Emphasis is on getting students to use the appropriate tool for their information need while considering indicators of authority. Collection of exercises requiring students to do the following: 1) look up background information on a communication theory; 2) chase down further readings; 3) find a scholarly article that applies a communication theory using the ComAbstracts database.

This activity was created to introduce first-year students to library resources they can use for their annotated bibliography assignment. In pairs, students are assigned a task card that requires them to find an information source. After finding a source meeting the criteria of their task card, the student teams input their answers into a Google Form. Formative assessment takes place during class, allowing the librarian to modify instruction on-the-spot based on the responses from the form.

A two part instruction session that uses the "fish bowl" method, or students as instructors, to find scholarly sources and complete an annotated bibliography citation.