Information literacy is a set of skills to find, retrieve, analyse and use information. Librarians usually teach these skills for faculty so they teach students to define, locate, select, organise, present and assess. The focus is on first year students and support students with their assessments.

The presentation focused on a specific programme and third year students doing a degree and undertaking a sociology module. Students did not have the skills to research a problem and the assessment was an analysis of a book related to one of the topics from course. Students however could not find other reviews to draw on and were not critical in their discussions.

The students were surveyed to find out what their skills were and what the issues were. The students did not get help at the point they needed it so had sessions in a period of time when they were doing assessments, they thought you could not get help from the library and it was just full of books.

To solve the problems the librarian went into class throughout the module for 20 minutes to provide information but also the students went to the library for a session. The learning was broken down into small pieces and did different skills each time so review a book, review an article.

The students’ feedback was positive and they felt they had the skills now to use a library, they could use the skills in other modules.