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Attendees will learn how the Purdue Libraries and the Department of Biological Sciences collaborated to put together online tutorials for biology students needing to learn how to search the published biological literature for "library" assignments in their biology classes.

Once upon a time the Department of Biological Sciences offered an 8-week Information & Communication Skills lab module for beginning biology majors. Due to a curriculum change, this class stopped being offered after spring 2007. Maribeth Slebodnik in the Purdue Libraries took the initiative to contact Laurie Iten, the faculty member in Biological Sciences who developed and taught this Information & Communications Skills class to ask if there was something that could be done to replace, if only partially, what biology students learned in her lab module. Maribeth and Laurie, along with Tim Kerr, then an academic advisor in Biological Sciences, decided that online library tutorials could fill the need for biology students to learn to search and use the published biological literature for their library assignments. Instead of creating original online library tutorials, they built derivatives of excellent MIT Open Courseware library tutorials developed for their Materials Science and Engineering students. All three collaborators scripted the tutorials using the "outline" of the MIT tutorials, as well as material taught in the old Information and Communication Skills class. Maribeth narrated all the tutorials, then Laurie packaged the audio, video, images, text and questions in an Adobe Captivate™ project. We then published each tutorial as a Flash file (originally on the biology department’s website, now on the Purdue Libraries’ website). The titles (and brief descriptions) of our seven tutorials for biology students are:
1. Introduction (overview of tutorials)
2. Publication Cycle & Scientific Research (how scientific research is conducted and published; primary and secondary resources)
3. Getting Started (where to search for books and articles; locating full text in print and online; getting help from library staff)
4. Basic Search Strategies (Google™ vs. library databases; database search techniques: keywords, Boolean operators, truncation)
5. Advanced Search Strategies (database search techniques: subject, field, publication type)
6. Evaluating Information (using scholarly sources; comparing sources, and corroborating facts)
7. Using and Creating Citations (interpreting and creating citations; citing sources).

Hopefully our online library tutorials for biology students will serve as an example for other academic disciplines in collaboration with their associated Purdue librarians to build library tutorials for their students.

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PDF files can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader.