The Library offers a suite of courses with the INFO prefix. The most well known course is INFO 1010 Information Literacy because all SUU students take this course as part of the General Education program. The Library offers additional INFO courses to prepare students for information problem solving in their specific disciplines, when doing research for theses, and real life. Our INFO courses focus on different aspects of information or information literacy.
All the INFO courses are described below. If you are interested in learning more about a particular course. Please reach out to any librarian on the Library Instruction Team.
An introduction to the library research process and related information skills such as developing a research question, searching, finding, and evaluating sources, synthesizing information across sources, using information ethically, and reflecting on the research process.
Disciplinary information literacy is both a way of understanding information and a set of skills for effectively finding, evaluating, and using that information in your academic discipline (e.g. biology, English, nursing, etc.). This course will introduce you to the techniques and tools that you can use to do effective library research to support information creation (e.g. presentation, paper, blog post, etc.) in your particular discipline.
This course is intended for Junior and Senior students who have already taken and passed ENGL 2010 Intermediate Writing, but still need to fulfill their INFO 1010 Information Literacy requirement for the General Education Program. INFO 2010 can be substituted for INFO 1010 and is tailored to students who have chosen a major. A minimum grade of C- is mandatory to meet the SUU Integrated Learning General Education requirement.
Over ten years ago Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to define the feeling that something is true, even if it isn’t actually true. The 2016 Oxford Dictionaries’ international word of the year was “post-truth,” which defines objective facts as less influential than what appeals to personal beliefs. In the years between “truthiness” and “post-truth” there has been a proliferation in the amounts of digital information created and shared. Our ability to critically navigate that information has not kept pace with the speed at which it is created. This course will introduce students to information analysis in our current information age, using object lessons and activities to increase their ability to sort through fake news, doctored digital content, misleading memes, and phony photographs while encouraging self-reflection and the examination of where their own beliefs come from.
We continually engage with the information ecosystem for work, school and in our free time. We post information on social media, read articles and newspapers, listen to podcasts, watch documentaries, and write blog posts and letters to our politicians. This course introduces students to the various literacies needed to navigate this information ecosystem, such as media literacy, visual literacy, and data literacy, among others. The course also helps students understand some of the behavioral, affective, cognitive, and metacognitive aspects of our information interactions.
This course includes lecture and discussion, hands-on-activities and provides an introduction to archives. The course will cover the history, development, and nature of work in the profession and in the real world, discussing how archival institutions work with the general public and with historians in particular. The basics of collections management and development, intellectual control, preservation, conservation, and technological applications will be presented.
Occasionally, Library faculty will offer courses on a special area of interest or a particularly timely topic under this course number. The class schedule and course syllabus provide further information on each Special Topic course.
This course is intended for those students who are embarking on their thesis and capstone research projects. During the span of a single semester, students work on selecting a topic, building background knowledge on that topic, searching discipline-specific databases for relevant sources, engaging with these sources, and synthesizing information from those articles into a coherent literature review that situates their proposed research project in the existing literature. The assignments in this course guide students on the initial steps of their thesis and capstone research projects and have one final concrete deliverable: a finished literature review. Research and Writing consults with Library faculty and The Writing Center are built into the course.