Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and starting in July she will also be the Head of the Undergraduate Library. Lisa is also a member of the ACRL Information Literacy Institute Immersion faculty and has taught instruction courses at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, both in-person and online, and undergraduate courses in critical thinking at Illinois State University and Parkland College. Lisa is the Editor of Research Strategies and author of the Neal-Schuman Electronic Classroom Handbook. Her scholarly interests include service innovations, information literacy, library use, user assessment, and education and professional development for academic librarians.

Lisa Sloniowski

Lisa Sloniowski is the Information Literacy Program Coordinator for York University Libraries and is Co-Chair of the CORIL editorial board. (Cooperative Online Repository for Information Literacy). She was previously Information Literacy Coordinator at the University of Windsor and began her career in academic libraries at the University of New Brunswick. Her research interests include the role of libraries in relation to social justice issues, with a particular focus on the relationhip between media and information literacies. Lisa holds two Master's degees, in English Literature and Information Studies, and has presented at various conferences on issues relating to the research behaviour of undergraduate students, web search strategies and the role of information literacy in librarianship. Lisa is also the conference co-chair of WILU 2007 at York University.

Outreach and Engagement: Helping Students Find the Information Literacy Map

Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lisa Sloniowski, York University

session 4d / Friday, May 12 / 9:00 - 10:30

Much has been said about information literacy and faculty outreach. Librarians work hard to get faculty members on board for our IL initiatives. However, missing pieces of the outreach puzzle are the students themselves. Some faculty will make decisions on whether to include library instruction workshops based on an assessment of student interest – and as we know, student interest in library instruction is often very low indeed! How do we get and keep students’ attention in our overly information-saturated world? How do we convince them of the relevance of what we have to offer? Student outreach activities are a key component of any successful information literacy program. In particular, digital outreach initiatives and exciting, relevant programming are good strategies to attract student interest. However, the emperor must have clothes – once lured to our classrooms students need to be kept engaged and stimulated by our teaching and learning practices. This session will explore the theories behind outreach activities and classroom engagement techniques and then turn to examples from practice, ending with the collaborative development of suggestions for characteristics of a good outreach activity/initiative which would be based both on the presenters’ suggestions as well as criteria nominated by people in the session.