Gustavus Adolphus College Assistant Professor and Academic Librarian Julie Gilbert has been named the 2012 recipient of the Minnesota Academic Innovators Award from the Minnesota Library Association (MLA).
The award recognizes academic librarians or academic project teams who have made an outstanding recent contribution to advance the mission of an academic library in Minnesota through an innovative project, program or service. The award is sponsored by the MLA’s Academic & Research Libraries Division.
Gilbert, along with faculty colleagues in the political science department, developed an innovative way to embed information literacy in the major by adding a weekly library-based lab to the department’s methods course. Gilbert also captured data on student learning in different models and has evidence that the lab experience significantly improves student learning.
“Since academic librarians everywhere struggle to help students dig deeper into their understanding of how information works, this model is an important innovation,” said Gustavus Professor and Academic Librarian Barbara Fister. “It’s typical of Julie’s combination of intellectual curiosity and rigor that she and faculty in the political science department wrote up their findings for PS, the American Political Science Association’s journal of record as well as presenting her findings to the academic librarian community. This combination of innovative pedagogy, learning assessment, and scholarship extends the impact of her work so that it can provide a tested model for learning information literacy in higher education.”
Gilbert earned her bachelor’s degree from Gustavus in 1999 and went on to earn a master’s degree from St. John’s University, and a master of library and information science degree from Dominican University in River Forest, Ill. She has worked at Gustavus since 2006.
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