Library Instruction Info for Faculty

Librarians can present a library instruction session to your class in-person, via Zoom or a pre-recorded video. 

The content of a session will be customized to your preferences, student knowledge and their research assignment. Typically library instruction sessions include the following information:

• Overview of the physical & online library
• How to search for books, articles and other library resources
• How to select & narrow a topic 
• Best practices for searching library databases by keyword
• Evaluating sources
• Work time for students to try out these new skills:)
• Getting help via a Research Appointment, email, chat or in-person

Librarians can create a customized video tutorial for your class! Videos can be posted on our Library YouTube channel and/or on Canvas within your course.  Advantages of recorded video tutorials are:

• Students can watch the video as homework, saving class time.
• Students can skip or re-watch segments of the video, depending on their knowledge and skill level with research.
• Students can follow along with the tutorial when conducting their own research.
• The videos can be re-used for class assignments from one to semester to another (unless there are changes in content or a library resource).
• Videos can be as short as a few minutes to an hour and anything in between depending on the content.

Examples of video tutorial content:

• Step-by step how to access the library website and how to choose the research database best suited for a student's assignment.
• Step-by-step how to figure out what search terms (keywords) from a student research question or topic to enter to get the best results in a research database.

Did you know that the Heartland Library has subject and class specific Research Guides? We can create one for your subject area or class!

Subject Research Guides

Subject Guides are focused on a single or several related areas of knowledge. Take a look at a few of our subject Research Guides such as Nursing or the Humanities to get an idea of the content we can include.

Class Research Guides

Class Research Guides are created for individual classes such as ENGL 101 or PSY 209. Typically these guides contain information that is referenced in our library instruction session or a recorded video.  Each guide is created with customized information for the class requested and students have access to the guide throughout the semester.

Class Research Guide Maintenance

LibGuides are unpublished and inaccessible during times in which the course is not in session.  Faculty members will need to contact the library in order to have a previously active LibGuide published again.  This policy is in place to update links, check relevancy of materials and conduct routine maintenance.