6 courses with the subject LI, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
In this one-credit, half-semester course students will hone their search skills in a variety of resources, selection of proper sources, and the evaluation of search results. Classes will interrogate the social, political and economic issues of information.
An examination of how students can explore and utilize primary sources in special and digital collections, from medieval manuscripts to local restaurant menus, from drawers of bird specimens to baseball cards, for research. Students will learn how to identify primary sources from secondary sources, conduct research in both physical and online special collections, explore the vast array of primary source resources, and interrogate the complexities of archives as it relates to their holdings and the digitization process.
A critical consideration of the ways libraries simultaneously preserve, reflect, perpetuate, and challenge cultural assumptions of the diverse communities they serve. Students will examine the roles of libraries in the United States and identify ways that these institutions participate in both systems of privilege and movements toward social justice in contemporary America. Students will develop a proposal to enact one change that is "overdue" to make Skidmore's library more just and present it to a panel of Scribner Library faculty and staff.
An exploration of how societal factors such as class, race, gender, sexuality, and immigration impacted the development of libraries in the 19th and 20th centuries and their continuing influence on public libraries in the United States today. Students will investigate how contemporary libraries address societal inequities through their resources, services, and collections, and how societal forces directly impact how these libraries operate. A primary focus will be censorship including the radical shift from an acceptance and enforcement of censorship in early libraries to the staunch defense of intellectual freedom seen today. Students will conduct primary source research on cases of censorship to design Banned Books Week posters for the campus.
An examination of mass incarceration in New York State and nationally, paying particular attention to restrictions on the flow of information both into and out of carceral institutions. Students will gain first-hand experience of the realities of those restrictions by responding to real reference questions from currently incarcerated patrons and work with community partners, some of whom are incarcerated, in order to learn from their experiences of censorship and help address some of their information needs. This project will involve such activities as doing contextual research, contributing to archival organization and descriptions, editing audio interviews, or facilitating creative arts installations.
Preparation for a senior thesis, capstone, or honors project that requires a serious research component. Students will work one-on-one with a subject specialist in the library to prepare the groundwork for an intensive academic project within their major. Students will be instructed in the organization of information and in sophisticated search strategies for finding, evaluating, and using information.
Source: Skidmore College's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
