News from the Field

David Free

College of St. Scholastica Library Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Bede Award for Undergraduate Research

The College of St. Scholastica Library in Duluth, Minnesota, is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its annual Bede Award, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate research and the application of information literacy. Offered since 2014, the Bede has become the longest standing all-college academic award at St. Scholastica. The winner of this year’s competition is senior Veronica Poquette of Arnold, Maryland, for research on her paper “Swedish Deaf Language & Culture,” which she submitted last fall for the college’s American Sign Language course, Deaf Culture in the World.

Competitors for the Bede Award submit a reflective essay on their research for an A or A-graded research paper from the past year, which they also include in their submission packet. Competition guidelines for the required essay prompt students to remark on how they identified their information need, and subsequently, how they evaluated and selected sources to fill that need. They are asked to discuss their process for finding sources and to elaborate on any special problems they encountered along the way as well as any special insights that were gained through the research process. Lastly, the applicants are asked to comment on what research skills gained through their process might be carried over to future academic work. The $350 Bede Award is sponsored by the Friends of The College of St. Scholastica Library.

The College of St. Scholastica Library is located above Our Lady Queen of Peace Chapel, a place of worship for Duluth’s community of Benedictine Sisters, which founded the college in 1912 and continues to serve as its sponsors. One of the rituals of the library’s annual award ceremony is to capture a photograph of the winner with a copper frieze of the Venerable Bede, the competition’s namesake who is often referred to as “father of English history.” Created in 1954 by the Hungarian artist and nun, Sister Constantina Kakonyi, SSND, the sculpture is installed outside the chapel, and seen by library patrons and staff as they depart the library.

2025 ACRL Board of Directors Candidates

ACRL is pleased to announce the slate of candidates for the association’s Board of Directors for the 2025 ALA/ACRL elections.

Vice-President/President-Elect: Dawn Behrend, Lenoir-Rhyne University; Alexia Hudson-Ward, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Director-at-Large: Andrea Falcone, Binghamton University-SUNY; Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Duke University

Director-at-Large: Kimberley Bugg, Atlanta University Center; Elaine Hirsch, Lewis & Clark College

Councilor: Millie Gonzalez, Framingham State University; Cassandra Kvenild, University of Wyoming Libraries

A full list of candidates for ACRL and section offices will be available in the January 2025 issue of C&RL News.

Old Dominion Joins ASERL

At their 2024 Annual Meeting, members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) voted unanimously to admit Old Dominion University (ODU) as the newest member of the association. ODU is the first new member to join ASERL since 2021, for a total of 39 institutional members in 12 states. ASERL focuses much attention on professional development, community building, collaborating on large-scale shared print library collections, as well as a very active resource sharing community.

The ODU libraries offer a wealth of knowledge and resources with the core purpose to “inspire and empower users to learn, grow, and create.” ODU’s Special Collections and University Archives focus on primary and historical materials on the development of Hampton Roads, Virginia, politics and politicians, local LGBTQIA+ and African American history and culture, military and maritime history, medicine and public health, fine and performing arts in Virginia, and more.

New from ACRL—Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework

ACRL announces the publication of Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework, by Michele Santamaría and Nicole Pfannenstiel. This new book demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today’s evolving information landscape.

Information Literacy and Social Media provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change.

There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. These lesson plans offer multiple platform ideas so readers can remix the approach to suit their learning contexts. Finally, applying information literacy dispositions, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media can help you teach your students to be truly metaliterate in creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency.

Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Project MUSE Adds Sport Sciences Hosted Journals

Project MUSE welcomes two journals from a new publisher, FiT Publishing. FiT is a nonprofit publisher in the sport sciences at the International Center for Performance Excellence (ICPE) in the College of Applied Human Sciences (CAHS) at West Virginia University.

The International Journal of Sport Finance serves as a high-level forum for the world-wide dissemination of current research on sport finance topics from both a globally diversified and multidisciplinary perspective. Sport Marketing Quarterly serves as an outlet for the dissemination of sport marketing information for both practicing professionals and academicians. The journal is committed to publishing high-quality research that advances the study and practice of sport marketing and is relevant to the professional interests of the sport marketing community. Learn more about Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/.

New OCLC Linked Data Position Paper

OCLC has released “Linked data: The future of library cataloging,” a position paper that articulates the value that linked data can bring to library catalogs, and the tools already available to help ease libraries into creating a more interconnected experience for information seekers. The brief, 12-page paper follows OCLC’s path from decades of linked data research, to experiments and prototypes, to the creation of more than 150 million WorldCat Entities, and, most recently, to the web application and APIs now available through OCLC Meridian that libraries can use to get started. The position paper helps answer the question of why the move to linked data is important for libraries and is freely available on the OCLC website at https://www.oclc.org/go/en/publications/linked-data-the-future-of-library-cataloging.html.

ACRL Releases Spatial Literacy in Public Health: Faculty-Librarian Teaching Collaborations

ACRL announces the publication of Spatial Literacy in Public Health: Faculty-Librarian Teaching Collaborations, edited by Laureen P. Cantwell-Jurkovic and Tammy Parece, a collection of ideas and plans for collaborative spatial literacy teaching and learning initiatives focusing on geographic information systems (GIS)-based and GIS-related instruction through the lens of public health topics.

Spatial literacy—the ability to visualize, understand, and use the properties of space to communicate, reason, and problem-solve—is relevant across a wealth of disciplines. Spatial Literacy in Public Health offers step-by-step learning activities, teaching tips, recommended readings, and four-color maps as well as other useful illustrations. These not only support student learning, but also professional development for librarians interested in spatial literacy instruction and in pitching such instruction to potential faculty collaborators. Interdisciplinary topics include supply chain management, social media campaigns, data visualization, racial disparities, and other demographic themes related to immunization patterns, epidemiology, recreation access, and community health and environmental health/environmental science.

Spatial Literacy in Public Health offers specific plans for collaborative, interdisciplinary spatial literacy instruction and activities. Chapters also connect with supplementary content in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Sandbox (https://sandbox.acrl.org), including activity-focused slide decks and more, all findable with the tag “#SpatialLit” and freely available.

Spatial Literacy in Public Health: Faculty-Librarian Teaching Collaborations is available for purchase in print and as an ebook through the ALA Online Store; in print through Amazon.com; and by telephone order at (866) 746-7252 in the United States or (770) 442-8633 for international customers.

Samantha H. Peter Appointed Publications in Librarianship Book Series Editor

ACRL announces the appointment of Samantha H. Peter to the post of editor for the Publications in Librarianship (PIL) book series. ACRL’s PIL series is a peer-reviewed collection of books that has reported on scholarly thinking and emerging theories and research in academic and research librarianship since 1951. The PIL editor works closely with the ACRL content strategist and PIL Editorial Board to acquire, develop, and peer review appropriate research-based books. Peter is chair of Research and Instruction and instructional design librarian at the University of Wyoming Libraries. She has multiple editorial experiences that will inform her work with PIL, including establishing the diamond open access Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education and co-editing the forthcoming ACRL volume Navigating Disability in the Academic Library Workplace. Peter succeeds Mark E. Shelton, director of library services at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and will serve a three-year term which began July 1, 2024.