Library-smart house collaboration for information literacy development

Abstract

The Library-Smart House partnership seeks to design and implement a sustainable, virtual environment for collaboration that will seamlessly integrate project communication and information access. This virtual environment will provide a means for increased collaboration between students, faculty, librarians and outside contributors as well as ensure the sustainability of the project in coming years. The Smart House is a student-led, multidisciplinary project to retrofit an existing house to be a living-laboratory. The house will be a platform for testing innovations in the areas of energy, health, environment, interaction, and lifestyle. The ultimate goal of the organization is to improve the quality of life for those living and working in an urban residential setting. The Smart House is a collaborative design project not only across different disciplines, but also across student year and domain knowledge levels. This collaboration produces a wide array of student information needs and presents a unique opportunity for library collaboration. The Library plans to study the effectiveness of information literacy instructional techniques through the contextual setting of the Smart House. The Library seeks to improve the ability of participants to access, evaluate, and use high quality research materials effectively through a variety of instructional strategies. By developing and maintaining a virtual infrastructure for information awareness and access using relevant technologies, the library will be able to assist students at their point of need. More direct instruction will be provided through a series of active learning workshops combined with specialized research consultation. We believe that this project will promote the lifelong learning skills necessary for the Engineer of 20201 by providing interdisciplinary collaboration paired with information literacy instruction within the framework of Smart House design. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.