Reflective Practice | Loyola University New Orleans

Liaisons work to build a community of practice around information literacy and its related technologies. This involves participating in an ongoing reflective practice which invites the wider university, profession, and community to join that reflection. It is our hope that, by sharing our scholarship and our assessment projects, we offer engaging entry points to the conversation.

We also showcase the outstanding research of our students and faculty in order to bring together Loyola's diverse activities in this arena. In doing so, we suggest the synergy possible in discovering shared questions, concerns, methods, literature, data, theories, applications, and other approaches, while still honoring what makes each of us unique as researchers.

In particular, we recognize students for their research endeavors each year. The Monroe Library Student Research Competition (MLSRC) is our annual research competition for students of all levels, from freshman to graduate. Each spring we select as many as four recipients to recognize for their outstanding research completed during the previous calendar year. Winners receive a cash prize and recognition in several outlets, including the library's newsfeed.

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Librarian Scholarship

Ezell and Rosenbloom Garner Accolades for Research

ALA's Library Instruction Round Table recognizes librarians' research on teaching primary source materials

Monroe Library is so proud of its two latest award winners, Jason Ezell and Lucy Rosenbloom. The two librarians have been recognized by LIRT, the Library Instruction Round Table of the American Library Association, as having authored one of the top 20 articles of 2021 on instructional design in library pedagogy.

This recognition is a significant accomplishment, particularly given the number of pedagogically-focused publications released every year. The honor also places Loyola University New Orleans among a group of institutions known for developing cutting-edge, innovative approaches to library instruction. In particular, their work focuses on the intersection of primary source research and the role that students’ affect and personal experiences can play in motivating learning.

The article covers instruction that took place in Ezell’s First-Year Seminar, Beyond Stonewall, which focuses on his area of scholarly research regarding the more diverse and complex movement history that follows on gay liberation. Rosenbloom, the embedded librarian for the course, instructed students on searching for archival materials using Gale’s Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940.

Together, the two librarians analyzed student reflections composed after a course research project that asked them to conduct exploratory research in the database that resonated with their personal experiences.

Affective patterns that Ezell and Rosenbloom found recorded in their reflections were surprise, experience, attention, and stumbling. All reactions demonstrated engagement as well as evidence of mastering fundamental skills needed to meaningfully incorporate primary source materials in scholarly projects. Based on the results they saw in their students’ reflections, the two librarians theorize that additional advance preparation with the students would position them even more favorably for a successful learning experience. Similarly, they assert that following up afterwards with research actions can further drive meaningful freshman interaction with source materials.

Their success with this endeavor has also led to an initiative for primary source instruction in many other places throughout Loyola’s curriculum, supported by Special Collections and Archives’ Digital Collections Librarian/Archivist, Andrew Lau.

Please join us in congratulating Jason and Lucy and celebrating their achievement!

Librarian's Research in Professional Spotlight

Elmwood Nationally Recognized for Research in Information Literacy Pedagogy

After a career teaching English and American Studies at the college-level, Assistant Professor Victoria Elmwood began her second career as a librarian at Loyola by contributing meaningfully to information literacy instruction at the Monroe Library. She has focused on best practices and methods for teaching source evaluation, and her latest scholarly research centers on the increasingly high-stakes question of how to determine the integrity of a source. Published in the December 2020 issue of top-quartile journal Communications in Information Literacy, “The Journalistic Approach: Evaluating Web Sources in an Age of Mass Disinformation” outlines a new approach to teaching students of all ages how to make these kinds of assessments. And then people started taking notice.

It came first in an email from Serbian librarian Anđelija Lazić, who requested permission to translate the article for republication in Korak Biblioteke (The Step of the Library). And as of August 25, 2021, the article has been downloaded 495 times. This not-too-shabby number of downloads in just eight months was no doubt influenced by the article’s recognition this past June by the Association of College and Research Libraries’s Instruction Section as one of 2020’s top publications on information literacy. The article focuses on an approach to teaching source evaluation that ensures a deep, qualitative assessment as opposed to the shallower read that results from a checklist-based method. Though the eponymous journalistic approach is more time-consuming than the checklist method, the article notes, users can expect to become more adept at applying this method with practice.

Elmwood says she was both surprised and delighted by the recognition. “I see so many students who think Google is all they need to get good information, but I have to remind them that sometimes you get what you pay for,” she explains. At the same time, Elmwood notes, “Even sources from library databases can use a layer of evaluation.”

Her peers at the Monroe Library also value the journalistic approach. Elmwood’s method of source evaluation, which grows out of several earlier critiques of the checklist model, has been integrated into the library’s new suite of information literacy modules for use in First Year Seminars. Indeed, information literacy is included as one of the three key learning objectives for the course, which is in the Loyola Core. Regarding the new push for teaching information literacy to incoming freshmen, Jason Ezell, the library’s Interim Dean of Research, Teaching, and Assessment says, “By adopting Victoria’s journalistic approach to teaching source evaluation, we demonstrate how crucial information literacy is to our Jesuit mission.” He goes on to say, “We give them the tools for acting justly in an increasingly complicated information environment by teaching all our students to engage information complexly and meaningfully.”

Congratulations to LDL as Data Fellows Kure Croker and Victoria Elmwood

Congratulations to Kure Croker, Special Collections Registrar and Archivist, and Victoria Elmwood, User Experience and Outreach Librarian, for their selection as LDL (Louisiana Digital Library) As Data Fellows. Kure and Victoria were awarded funding to work with the digital cultural heritage material presented in the Louisiana Digital Library.

Kure is planning to use records in the Franck-Bertacci Photograph Collection to create a digital map that will highlight commercial areas in post-WWII New Orleans. Victoria has created digital maps that identify significant locations in New Orleans’s sex work industry from the antebellum period to WWII, and she plans to make her work more accessible by rebuilding her maps as an online shareable resource.

Each fellow will present their project at a Lunch at the (Digital) Library Brown Bag event, a virtual event series that will run from August to December 2021. The resulting projects and resources will ultimately be published on the LDL as a sample of the digital scholarship that can be pursued with LDL collections.

The fellowship is generously funded by the Collections as Data team and Mellon Foundation funds re-granted through the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The LDL as Data Fellowship is part of the LDL as Data project, which fosters the ethical use of the digital library’s historic state collections as data by supporting research and teaching that uses digital tools and methods to approach LDL materials in novel ways.

The Monroe Library is so proud of our talented faculty and staff. Congratulations again, Kure and Victoria!

Loyola Faculty Selected as Open Textbooks Pilot Cohort Leader

Dr. Victoria Elmwood Monroe Library librarian and Assistant Professor Victoria Elmwood has been selected as a cohort leader in a Department of Education-funded grant project. The $2 million grant awarded to LOUIS, the Louisiana Library Network, funds the creation of open educational resources (OER) for 25 of the state’s general education courses for students taking dual enrollment courses, which earn the student both high school and college credit. Dual enrollment courses can make college more attainable by allowing students to earn college credit at significantly lower costs and by accelerating the student’s time to complete their degree, but the high price of course textbooks and other course materials can be a barrier to participation.

The LOUIS/Department of Education grant funds the development of OER such as textbooks, quizzes, and tests that can be used in dual-enrollment classes at no cost to the students. The OER will be released under licenses that permit their reuse and modification by others in the state and worldwide.

Creation of the OER will be a collaboration between librarians, teaching faculty, and technologists. Loyola’s User Experience Librarian Victoria Elmwood will lead a cohort of five teaching faculty to develop OER for English Composition I courses. The impact of this project cannot be overstated, as approximately 20,000 high school students and 250,000 total students in Louisiana alone participate in dual-enrollment courses.

Congratulations, Dr. Elmwood!

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Student Research

Monroe Library Student Research Competition is open!

Have you been working on a research project that uses the library's wide array of resources in interesting or novel ways?

The Monroe Library Student Research Competition recognizes and rewards students who make exemplary use of the collections, resources, and services of the J. Edgar & Louise S. Monroe Library throughout the research process in order to produce an academic or creative work. You can view information about past winners . The committee is especially eager to receive submissions representing the range of Loyola's academic programs and their approaches to research. Creative or innovative work in any format or discipline is eligible.

Award

$200 for a freshman/sophomore research project
$200 for a junior/senior research project
$200 for a senior capstone/thesis project
$200 for a graduate student research project

Eligibility

To be eligible to win, individual or team applicants must:

Have completed their research project for a credit course at Loyola during the past calendar year (spring, summer, or fall semester). Research projects include, but are not limited to, papers. Creative or innovative works in any format or discipline are encouraged.
Agree to contribute to publicity related to the award.

Collaborative projects are encouraged. If a team project applies, all team members must contribute toward the application. If a team project wins, the award will be split equally among members.

For information about the application process, as well as selection criteria, visit the Student Research Competition page on the Monroe Library website. Have any questions? Contact Jason Ezell.

Announcing the Monroe Library Student Research Competition Winners

Congratulations to our scholars!

The Monroe Library is pleased to announce the three winners of the Monroe Library Student Research Competition. This year saw a sweep of the competition by students working in the field of history who conducted research on projects that all focus on social justice. The winning pieces were distinguished by the variety of appropriate sources they used, as well as the sophistication and complexity with which those sources were integrated into each author’s original work.

Let’s hear more about the research projects and their authors, all of which were written during the 2021 calendar year.

The winner in the Freshman/Sophomore category is first-year History major Andrea Norwood, for the paper, “A Changing Identity: Loyola’s LGBT+ Organization Over the Years (1991-2012).” Written for Prof. Allison Edgren’s class, The Historian’s Craft, this paper traces the history of LGBT+ organizations on Loyola’s campus over a twenty-year period.

Norwood’s research was conducted using digitized archival sources, including The Maroon and The Wolf, which can be found on the Monroe Library’s Special Collections and Archives website. She notes: “I had never based my research extensively on primary sources before, so the process of looking into an archive was completely new to me,” making the sophisticated synthesis of her findings all the more notable.

The winner in the Junior/Senior category is junior Molly Sullivan, whose paper, “An Analysis on How We Got Here: The Explosion of COVID-19 Conspiracies,” was written for Prof. Mark Fernandez’s class, American Conspiracies. In it, Sullivan, a double major in Sociology and Spanish, looks at the spread of disinformation during the pandemic and its negative social impact.

Especially intriguing was her resourceful use of existing data to identify patterns that describe the spread of disinformation via social media. Focusing her analysis on the scapegoating of marginalized groups during the COVID-19 pandemic, she explains the impulses motivating individuals who spread conspiracy theories: “Overwhelmed by skepticism and fear, sharing false claims disguised as knowledge allows individuals to take back some options in daily life.”

The winner in the senior capstone project category is honors History major Analene McCullough. Her senior thesis, written with the support of faculty advisor Prof. Mark Fernandez, is entitled “The Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground: Transition to Violence.”

McCullough conducts thorough research, synthesizing a range of materials -- especially primary sources -- into a very readable narrative. This is impressive and crucial work in telling a story that has, as she notes, mostly been shared in fragments. And, as she argues, this is a story that is unusually relevant in today's political climate.

Congratulations to this year’s winners!

Monroe Library to Host 14th Annual Student Peace Conference

(New Orleans, La. , March 25, 2021) - The Loyola University New Orleans Student Peace Initiative will host the annual Student Peace Conference from March 28 to April 1. This year’s theme is “Navigating a Fragmented World: Concurring and Dissenting Opinions.”

Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré is this year’s keynote speaker and will discuss the path forward from the threat to democracy following the attack on the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The conference will also include eight student panels and three film screenings. Dr. Bahman Maghsoudlou, a prominent film scholar, author, critic, director and guest of Middle East Peace Studies program and the Women’s Resource Center, will be at the screenings of both of his films, “Razor’s Edge: The Legacy of Iranian Actresses” and “Iran Darroudi: The Painter of Ethereal Moments.”

“Our student panels tackle topics including climate change, inclusion and exclusion, and nationalism while bringing to the forefront some of the most difficult-to-talk-about issues that plague our ever-divided globe,” said Loyola student and conference chair Joseph Pitre.

The Student Peace Conference is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of History, the Women’s Resource Center, the Middle East Peace Studies program and the Patrick G. O’ Keefe Distinguished Professorship in History.

The full schedule is below, and guests can also follow along virtually via the following links. All of the events will be held in Monroe Library Multimedia Room 2 unless otherwise stated.

Monday, March 28, 2022

4:30 PM CST

“Rethinking Nationalism”

Public Link: https://loyno.zoom.us/j/94848064148

6:00 PM CST

“Opening Arguments: A Keynote with Lieutenant General Russel L. Honore”

Public Link: https://loyno.zoom.us/j/94584163800

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

12:30 PM CST

“Corporate Killers: Ecocide”

https://loyno.zoom.us/j/97649214425

2:00 PM CST