Connecting Information Literacy Efforts to Student Retention

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Experts say that student retention in academe is the continued enrollment of a student from the first year to the second year, and on to graduation. In this class,  we discuss the difference a librarian makes as teacher of information literacy, study skills, time management, and academic writing, and in mentoring and supporting students from first year to graduation.

Existing campus programs may be made up of a retention or enrollment office, career services, and a tutoring center, for example. In these cases, librarians need a seat at that table. In other situations, librarians have an opportunity to create an innovative grass-roots program. Either way, the bottom line for librarians is that student retention is measurable, improves, and the institution thereby graduates informationally literate leaders of the future. Librarians have a place in this entire process.

By the end of this course the participate will be able to:

  1. Conduct and study best practice research
  2. Create a proposal to campus administration to create a grass-roots program, or to become embedded into an existing retention program.
  3. Create and customize institutional information literacy programs designed to help increase student retention
  4. Develop communities across the campus in support of retention activities
  5. Learn to present your ideas based on research and review a real-life case study, conducted by the instructor pre-and post-Covid.

The time commitment for this four-week asynchronous course is 15 hours total.

The instructor, Debra Lucas-Alfieri, Professor Emeritus, was the Head of Reference, Interlibrary Loan, Public Services, Information Analysis, and Instruction, for over 20 years at D'Youville University in Buffalo, N.Y. Debra has been teaching online library science classes, seminars, and webinars for over a decade, working with national and international institutions and organizations. Through her research and publications, Debra’s teachings and philosophies are highly impactful, regarded, studied, and cited across the globe.

She is the author of Marketing the 21st Century Library: The Time is Now, published by Chandos, an imprint of Elsevier. She has also published academic journal articles in Collaborative Librarianship, the Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve, and the Journal of Library and Information Science. She has co-authored and published articles in the nursing and pharmaceutical field. Her book chapters appear in Middle Management in Academic and Public Libraries, and the 21st Century Handbook of Anthropology. Additionally, she served as an editor for the Journal of Library Innovation. Dozens of encyclopedia articles appear in the Encyclopedia of Power, the Encyclopedia of Time, the Encyclopedia of Anthropology, and the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Pop Culture.

Before leaving D'Youville University, she was appointed Faculty Senate Parliamentarian and served from 2018 until she retired in 2022. During her tenure at the university, she was awarded a Sabbatical and Faculty Research Grant in 2014, a Faculty Fellowship Award in 2015-2016, and a promotion to Full-Librarian Academic Rank in 2016. She graduated from the WNYLRC Leadership Institute in 2007. Her retirement created the synergy to collaborate with countless librarians who drive our profession and institution of libraries successfully and strategically into the future. 

 

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