Librarians and Instructional Designers

With online education options more ubiquitous and sophisticated than ever, the need for academic librarians to be conversant with digital resources and design thinking has become increasingly important. The way forward is through collaboration with instructional designers, which allows librarians to gain a better understanding of digital resource construction, design, goals, and responsibilities. In this book, the authors demonstrate that when librarians and instructional designers pool their knowledge of curriculum and technology, together they can impact changes that help to better serve faculty, students, and staff to address changes that are affecting higher education. Illustrated using plentiful examples of successful collaboration in higher education, this book introduces the history of collaborative endeavors between instructional designers and librarians, sharing ideas for institutions of every size; reviews key emerging issues, including intellectual property, digital scholarship, data services, digital publishing, and scholarly communication; addresses library instruction, particularly the new information literacy framework and threshold concepts, and how the movement towards online library instruction can be supported through collaboration with instructional designers; describes the complementary roles of librarians and instructional designers in detail, followed by a case study in collaboration at Davidson College, an evolving digital project that mirrors changes in technology and collaboration over more than a decade; shows how librarians and instructional designers can work together to encourage, inform, train, and support both faculty and students in the use of digital media, media databases, online media, public domain resources, and streaming media tools; highlights creative opportunities inherent in the design and use of the Learning Management System (LMS); and looks ahead to how emerging technologies are already leading to new jobs at the intersection of librarianship and technology, such as the instructional design librarian. With a firm foundation on best practices drawn from a variety of institutions, this book maps out a partnership between academic librarians and instructional designers that will lead to improved outcomes.