Engaging Undergraduates in Primary Source Research: Innovations in Information Literacy

Lijuan Xu has been immersed in information literacy-related work since 1998. Her three-year stint as a user education librarian at SUNY Albany and fifteen-year tenure as the associate director of research and instruction at Lafayette College have helped her garner rich information literacy experiences.

In addition to partnering with individual faculty members to build information literacy into their courses, Lijuan has collaborated with the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CITLS) and the College Writing Program (CWP) to organize lunchtime events such as the faculty information literacy presentation and the ¿What¿s Your Favorite Writing Assignment¿ panel. Through the grant-funded HathiTrust-based ¿Digging Deeper Reaching Further¿ initiative, she has taught text mining workshops at different institutions, including Harvard and Columbia. At Lafayette, she has teamed up with faculty members to explore the application of computational tools such as Voyant in primary source-based teaching.