Austin, TX (May 19, 2005) - Last semester, In-Young Choi was one of 979 undergraduate volunteers in the College of Liberal Arts who helped librarians in the University of Texas Libraries find out more about how to assess information literacy skills among college students. Each volunteer completed a 20-30 minute anonymous survey form. The names of all College of Liberal Arts undergraduates who took the survey were entered into a drawing for $1,200 to be used towards the purchase of a laptop or desktop computer. In-Young Choi, sophomore Psychology major, won the lottery and $1,200.
SAILS is the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills, a measurement tool being developed by the Association of Research Libraries to evaluate how well students are able to find, access and evaluate information. Last year colleges and universities across the United States asked students to participate in this process in order to develop a valid and accurate test. This is the second year that the University of Texas Libraries has participated. Last year's winner was Mimi Trinh.
All of the results are submitted anonymously to a central database located at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The University of Texas at Austin will be able to find out how its students did as a whole and to compare our students to national averages. To learn more about SAILS, see http://sails.lms.kent.edu. The national project is funded by a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
For more information:
Michele Ostrow
Head, Library Instruction & Information Literacy Services
micheleo@austin.utexas.edu
512.495.4534
