Impact assessment of librarian-faculty collaboration to develop the digital literacy skills of a first-year composition class

Library resources at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) are 99.9% digital. Through data from pre-and-post-tests results of our library-faculty collaboration, our presentation will show the positive impacts of the partnership designed to guide a freshman composition class on the effective use of educational databases to safely access, identify, process, evaluate, retrieve, reserve and store needed information for casual reading, and research purposes. This effort seeks to make Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) meaningful, particularly for students with another first language. We developed a syllabus which includes practical tutorials on digital literacies to reduce reliance on peers or questionable websites; and to build citation skills, encourage responsible scholarship, and discourage contract cheating. Participants will be able to appreciate how sustained efforts by the librarian and the faculty yield positive results for the stakeholders involved. This presentation will also provide opportunities for comparisons with what applies in other AMICAL institutions, and invite discussions about creative collaborative syllabus and technological developments to make this partnership even richer.