Your lecturer will set assignments for you that will require you to carry out research. The library's collections of books, ebooks, journals and electronic information sources are the scholarly sources you are expected to use when doing academic work. This guide, created by librarians, will help you to develop good searches for your assignment topic, filter out irrelevant or unreliable information from your results, refine your search keywords, identify the most suitable scholarly sources to use and teach you how to do academic referencing so that you don't inadvertently fall foul of plagiarism, forgetting to cite your sources in your assignments. Step through the pages of this guide, watch the videos we've suggested and sign up for a library class in an area you want help with. The library's classes are free to all UL students, whether online or in-person.
Research has been conducted in to the use of libraries by students and their eventual academic success. Some studies suggest an association, but not a causation (Thorpe et al 2016) and other studies have established a correlation between library use and better student outcomes (Haddow, 2016).
This might seem obvious, if you spend a lot of time in the library, actually studying, do you learn more and do better in assignments and in exams? If you interact with the librarians, the collections and the library services, will you also do better academically? The research that has been published tells us that students who attend library instructional classes do better academically. This is a quote from a 2019 article on the subject, 'students who participated in the online information literacy module had better student outcomes than those that did not participate in the module' (Marineo & Shi, 2019).
In support of student success at UL, the library delivers supports to students in key areas relating to skills required to complete coursework, finding high quality information in appropriate scholarly collections and evaluating the suitability of the material for use in academic work. The library also teaches students about plagiarism and how to correctly reference content used in coursework. Together, these skills are referred to as inliteracy skills and are cited by the ACRL Framework, and others as critical lifelong learning skills.
References
Haddow, Gaby, Academic library use and student retention: A quantitative analysis, Library & Information Science Research,
Volume 35, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 127-136, DOI: 10.1016/j.lisr.2012.12.002.
Marineo, F. and Shi, Q. (2019) ‘Supporting Student Success in the First-Year Experience: Library Instruction in the Learning Management System’, Journal of library & information services in distance learning, 13(1-2), 40–55, available: https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290X.2018.1499235.
Thorpe, Angie & Lukes, Ria & Bever, Diane & He, Yan. (2016). The Impact of the Academic Library on Student Success: Connecting the Dots. portal: Libraries and the Academy. 16. 373-392. DOI: 10.1353/pla.2016.0027