Agriculture to Zoology: Information Literacy in the Life Sciences sets the stage for purposefully integrating information literacy activities within the subject-specific content of the life sciences. The book is written for librarians and other professionals who teach information literacy skills, especially those in the science disciplines, and most especially the life sciences. It is also intended to be helpful to secondary school teachers, college faculty who teach life science-related subjects, library school students, and others interested in information literacy and science education. Anyone wanting to learn more about the Earth's life sciences, from citizen to scientist, will benefit as well.
The book's seven chapters fill a gap with varying perspectives of literacy instruction in the life sciences and include resources identified by academic librarians as important for use in subject-specific research in higher education. Contributors are longtime specialists in the fields of the life sciences, science and information literacy, scientific and electronic communication, assessment, and more, including Arctic and Antarctic information.
1. Introduction to Information Literacy in the Life Sciences
Jodee L. Kuden and Julianna E. Braund-Allen
2. Scientific Literacy
Elizabeth Berman and Jodee L. Kuden
3. Designing Information Literacy Instruction for the Life Sciences
Katherine O’Clair
4. Agriculture and Plant Sciences Information Literacy
Livia Olsen
5. Marine and Aquatic Sciences Information Literacy
Sally Taylor
6. Polar (Arctic and Antarctic) Sciences Information Literacy
Sandy Campbell and Jessica Thorlakson and Julianna E. Braund-Allen
7. Zoological and Animal Sciences Information Literacy
Daria O. Carle
Jodee Kuden is a Professor and Head of Collection Development at UAA. Professor Kuden has worked in a variety of libraries, with the past 24+ years spent in an academic setting at three universities. Prior to her MLS, she was a school librarian, a director of a small public library, and worked a few brief stints in special, solo libraries. Over the years, Professor Kuden has had many responsibilities in the university library setting, beginning as a reference and instruction librarian, serving as library liaison to agriculture, economics, and business, and working in interlibrary loan, and in special collections, archive, and indexing departments. She has spent the last 12 years as the Head of Collection Development, managing all formats of the collection especially electronic resources, managing library liaisons and staff, and overseeing multi-million dollar library budgets. Professor Kuden also holds a second Master's degree in agricultural education, which aligns with her research emphasis in agricultural information as well as the mentoring of library science graduate students and new librarians.
Julianna E. Braund-Allen is an Instruction and Reference Librarian at UAA and a Management Team Librarian, ARLIS. Professor Braund-Allen has worked with arctic information in libraries and research settings since 1988 when she began her career at UAA's Arctic Environmental Information and Data Center. In the mid-1990s, she helped conceive of and establish the Alaska Resources Library & Information Services (ARLIS), which brought together the collections, budgets, and library expertise of nine Anchorage-based natural and cultural resources collections from federal, state, and university entities. She continues to co-manage ARLIS, which has garnered a National Performance Review Award and the National Award for Museum and Library Service, among others. Professor Braund-Allen has also worked as a reference and instruction librarian at UAA since the early 1990s, where she has focused on the library's one-credit, web-based course, LS101, Library Resources and Information Retrieval. Along with Professor Carle, she is editor of the Polar Libraries Bulletin.
Daria Carle is a Professor and Science Librarian at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She has a significant amount of experience providing library instruction in the sciences, and has published peer-reviewed articles in science education journals on incorporating the library into scientific writing courses. Prior to her career in libraries, Professor Carle worked as a seasonal wildlife biologist for the federal government. Since receiving her MLIS, she was selected for the National Library of Medicine's Associate Program, a highly competitive post-graduate internship, and worked at the University of Minnesota's Bio-Medical Library and the University of Colorado at Boulder Science Library. Since her arrival at UAA in 2000, she has successfully built a course-integrated library instruction program in the sciences from the ground up, incorporating elements of information literacy into the classes she teaches.