“InfoLit for U” MOOC is designed to facilitate students to use information analytically, creatively, and wisely to learn. It eases the transition to learn and inquire at the university, through developing university and career-related information literacy habits and practices. Learn from professionals' sharing, interactive content and information scenarios of eight disciplines, including arts & humanities, business & economics, education, engineering, law, health sciences, sciences, and social sciences. No pre-requisites or assignments! Learn more and enrol here. 

Through the Course Enhancement Funds, we are thrilled to go through many collaboration experiences with faculty members to enhance information literacy teaching and learning in subject-related course contexts.

In this issue, we are introducing the initiation of the Department of Accounting and Finance.

As a team entry, there has been collaborated efforts among Faculty Librarian, faculty staff as well as student helpers in making the project possible. With 10 videos developed, content prepared aimed to facilitate and support the curriculum needs of information skills in the area of usage of financial data for various students and research groups.

We hope to train students and researchers to be information smart as students as well as competence professionals in their work fields after graduation.

Students need to handle a great number of information tasks in their academic lives. How good are you at finding the right kind of information and use them effectively?

To carry on with our research in how university students use and evaluation information which started in 2016, the RRSA-HK 2018 was conducted once again in Mar 2018.

Research Readiness Self-Assessment (RRSA-HK) is a multiple choice test designed to measure and give immediate feedback to help students understand how well they can evaluate, and use information as a university student. We invited 200 Year-2 students from all academic departments to participate in the assessment. During the assessment, each student will need to answer 50 questions in around 30 minutes.

Upon completing the assessment, student will get a summary report documenting students’ information experience, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge as well as searching skills.

We will be analyzing the results very soon to design Information Literacy programmes to train our students to develop the essential life-long learning and critical thinking skills.

A big thank you for those who participated in our assessment!

In order to enable users and researchers to be smart information searchers, a great deal of content has been incorporated into our Library Workshops schedule.

Four special topics have been added in April covering areas in biomedical information, physics, engineering, computing, global market information, sciences, social sciences and humanities etc.

Participants exchanged ideas and learnt new tools and features of high quality resources for conducting literature search, drawing examples for comparison, making use of built-in setup for data collection etc.

It is nice to learn that many students and researchers joined our Library workshops enthusiastically every academic year. In the month of Mar, we are happy to learn that our users are particularly interested in the following sessions.

LS033N - Online Tools for Assignment Writing
Introduced participants to Library’s Guides, Phrasebook for Writing Papers and Research in English, Online References (e.g., Visual Thesaurus, Credo Reference), Britannica ImageQuest.

LS043 - Accessing E-book and E-journal Collections of the PolyU Library
Trained participants to locate articles via OneSearch (Library’s search engine), retrieving full-text articles and E-books, and reading E-books on mobile devices, using Audio E-books, Kindle E-books and Browzine, an E-Journal browser.

LS034 - Using Journal Analyzing Tools to Evaluate Journals
Introduced key tools to workshop attendees for evaluating journals in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) from Clarivate Analytics and CiteScore in Scopus Journal Metrics.

LS056/57 – Using EndNote
Covered features of EndNote X8 – from downloading the software, adding references, organizing and managing references, to creating bibliographies in different citation styles. Managing PDF files, working with Groups, finding and editing output styles, synchronizing EndNote web with Desktop Library etc.