Language Librarians’ Poster at the 74th IFLA General Conference and Council in Québec City

by Denis Lacroix (denis.lacroix@ualberta.ca) and Erika Banski (erika.banski@ualberta.ca)

The two language librarians, Erika Banski (Slavic and Germanic Languages) and Denis Lacroix (Romance Languages) from the University of Alberta Libraries (Edmonton, Canada) participated in the poster sessions on August 12th and 13th 2008 at the 74th IFLA General Conference and Council in Québec City with their poster entitled “… in from the cold”: Multicultural Researchers, Global Scholarship, and the Library. The poster focused on the role of librarians in helping international graduate students and researchers integrate into Canadian academic learning and discovery and overcome the academic cultural gap they face when they start their research in North America. This role was explained on the example of the cooperation of language librarians from the Humanities & Social Sciences Library with the graduate students and researchers in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (MLCS). The authors have observed that the problem of the academic cultural gap, defined as the level of information literacy (IL) need, is significantly greater in departments with high numbers of international researchers, such as the University of Alberta’s MLCS Department, of which 56% consists of international students while 33% consists of students in The Faculty of Arts. By applying a learner-centered model which includes librarians as equal partners in the academic knowledge community, the language librarians are helping international graduate students and researchers achieve competency in IL and take full advantage of the information resources and technology provided by the library. This endeavour saw an increase in IL sessions for MLCS students, in particular for the translation certificate and in the French program that is integrating for the first time this year IL as part of course objectives.

WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Fall 2008 > Language Librarians’ Poster at IFLA in Québec