Competencies for Students
Library Competencies for First Year Students & Sophomores
Created by the UM Information Literacy Committee
Primary and secondary skills for first year and sophomores to prepare them for junior and senior level research work.
- Students will be aware of services offered by the library: IM, available technology, study areas and service points
- Students will be able to identify the key concepts of their topic;
- Student will be able to focus and articulate their information needs by identifying keywords, synonyms and related terms;
- Students will be able to differentiate between the types of sources cited and understands the basic elements of citations;
- Students will evaluate the information retrieved to assess for quality and relevance;
- Student will be able to review the initial information located and determine whether the information satisfies the research question.
Library Competencies for Juniors & Seniors
Created by the UM Information Literacy Committee
Skills that Juniors and Seniors should know in order to be competent researchers in their majors.
Students will:
- Be familiar with research and publication protocols, such as knowledge of the discipline’s major journals, methods of publication (articles, books, peer review, etc.);
- Demonstrate an ability to model their writing after subject related protocols;
- Have an ability to incorporate scholarly research into their prose;
- Have interdisciplinary competence in library research and the ability to transfer knowledge of their own major into high-level work in other fields (English majors will be able to do research in history, political science, etc.)
- Be able to differentiate between popular and scholarly resources;
- Be able to identify the right resources for their research needs;
- Be able to locate articles that are not full text through indexes and then through locating print library journals;
- Have the ability to determine if journal articles, in print or online full text, are available through library resources;
- Be able to navigate complex research resources and have knowledge of catalog and database-specific language, including broader and narrower terms;
- Be able to differentiate between the free versus the fee-based Web sources;
- Be proficient in multiple citation formats for compiling bibliographies for several disciplines.
