In Combining the Old and the New history prof Mills Kelly writes about an interesting approach for introducing first-year college students to library resources: “for the rest of the semester, they proved much more willing to use the databases that our library spends so many hundreds of thousands of dollars to subscribe to.”

As most librarians know, information literacy only really comes about through being integrated into assignments like this, ones that focus on research and writing skills. What’s key to the assignment that Mills talks about is that it shows how digital media, along with personalized topics, can be a motivating factor in a student’s learning.