KUBIC: how to organize pop-up information literacy sessions at your libraries

Information literacy (IL) and research skills are essential competences for university students, no matter their education or degree. Efficiently looking for, selecting, evaluating and using information in a correct way will not only benefit them during their time as a student, but will also prove their usefulness in the context of lifelong learning in their further careers. However, not all programs at the KU Leuven University have already incorporated mandatory IL sessions into their curriculum and those who have, focus mainly on the bachelor years. Once in their masters, though, many students do not longer recall how to look for correct information for their dissertations. At that point, the university library can intervene and that is exactly what the 2Bergen Libraries of the KU Leuven (Biomedical sciences and Science & Technology) did. In order to better understand their needs, the students of the 2Bergen Libraries were questioned about their IL requests. The majority of the respondents was enthusiastic about additional IL sessions, on the condition that they were not too long, the right subject was given and that they were practical. With this information in mind, the 2Bergen Information Centre (2BIC) was founded. Short sessions of 45 minutes to 1 hour were organized on different subjects regarding IL skills. The target group were master and PhD students (both Dutch and English speaking) and there was no need to subscribe beforehand, to make the sessions as accessible as possible. 2BIC originally started as a bottom-up initiative in the 2Bergen Libraries, but has since been expanded (due to its success) to the whole of the KU Leuven Libraries, now including the libraries of the Humanities and Social Sciences as well. This expansion was accompanied by a name change (2BIC became KUBIC: KU Leuven Bibliotheken Information Center) and a different logo, layout and communication strategy. Challenges, results and conclusions of this start-up and merge will be discussed in the presentation.status: accepte