Undergrads And Image Searching: What Are They Doing? What Do They Need? Where Do We Fit?
- Conference Year
- Online Northwest 2011
- Session
- 2
- Type
- Breakout Session
- Presenters
- Laurie Bridges, Oregon State University
- Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Oregon State University
- Abstract
As librarians and archivists in higher education, it is both our charge and our challenge to meet and teach students wherever they are in their research journeys. A key component of this quest is gaining and refining the skills that make them “information literate.” Information literacy, as defined by the American Library Association, is the ability to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” However, “information” is not limited to textual documents; increasingly, students across disciplines are using images in for their coursework. Unfortunately, visual and image literacy skills are not a standard component in the library instruction curriculum. What do we really know about undergraduates and their image-searching behavior – and where do our online digital image repositories and professional knowledge fit? Last fall we set out to answer these questions.
Join Laurie Bridges and Tiah Edmunson-Morton for a discussion on our own research journey, which started with an online survey to 1,000 randomly chosen OSU freshmen students asking them about their image-searching behavior. In this session we will present our findings, discuss current research in our fields, and offer recommendations for future studies.
- Links