Please fill out this form to register for this ACRL-Oregon webinar on Thursday Sept. 10, 2020 from 10am-11am. After the session, a link to a recording of the session will be emailed to all registrants.

Speaking of Quality: Do Librarians and Instructors Assess Students' Sources the Same Way?

Do librarians and instructors guide students to the same kinds of sources for their course assignments? The assumed answer might be "yes," but a recent case study showed there is more to it. This presentation will discuss an ethnographic study that compared how a librarian and an instructor went about assessing the quality of bibliographies students produced for the instructor’s class. The study aimed to unearth meaningful nuances in the approaches librarian and instructor took to evaluating a source’s quality as well as what they actually meant by “quality.” Findings included differences in what signified quality to the librarian and instructor, that librarian and instructor looked to different parts of citations to verify shared values such as thoroughness, differences in what cued them to consult the citation versus the full text, and differences in their working definitions of “academic.” The aim of the study was to reveal such implicit practices and expectations around “quality” in order to make all working rubrics transparent to students.

Presenter: Elizabeth Pickard, Portland State University, Science & Social Sciences Librarian