Old Tool, New Function: Using LibGuides to Breathe New Life into the End-of-Semester Project

In 2008, Sherrod Library purchased Springshare’s LibGuides to create research guides for the library’s homepage. We also created LibGuides for individual classes when we taught library instruction sessions. Several of our professors worked closely with librarians to create the LibGuides for their classes, and those guides are heavily used. Inspired by this success, we looked for other ways to use LibGuides to connect with our faculty, students, and community. Our most creative use of LibGuides happened in 2013 when several librarians approached carefully-chosen faculty with an invitation to participate in a pilot project. We chose among the professors who routinely requested library instruction sessions; seemed to be open to trying new ways to engage their students; and whose classes were small and not writing intensive. These three professors were invited to a meeting where we offered them the opportunity to replace their traditional written paper with a LibGuide assignment. We explained that students will still have to do quality research to produce a good LibGuide and suggested that there are a number of benefits from replacing a written paper with a LibGuide assignment, including: • the replacement of an assignment that students don’t look forward to writing and professors don’t look forward to grading with a more engaging assignment; • the ability to engage students by assigning a robust research project using a flexible tool that is easy to use; • the creation of an electronic resource that students can easily include in an electronic portfolio. This presentation describes the pilot project