Survey of Best Practices in Developing Online Information Literacy Tutorials, 2017 Edition

The study looks closely at how much time, funding and effort academic libraries are spending developing information literacy tutorials. It also looks at the use of tutorials provided by vendors and by other libraries. This highly detailed, 300+ page study gives data and commentary on the types of programs and applications used to create tutorials, how tutorial developers are trained, how much time it takes to develop a tutorial, which subjects are chosen for treatment, how tutorials are marketed to library patrons and much more. Data is broken out separately by tuition level, type of college, enrollment and other variables for easier benchmarking. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: A mean 14.19 percent and a median 5 percent of the sampled libraries’ online information literacy tutorials available to library patrons are created by other libraries; the range was 0 to 90%. Just a few of the colleges mentioned for providing exemplary tutorials were: NC State College, Bainbridge State College, the University of Manchester, the University of Arizona, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Santa Fe College, University of Michigan, the University of Leicester, and Empire State College. A 39.53 percent plurality said they have no live action video tutorials available at their libraries. 51.16 percent of organizations sampled have tutorials on citation formatting. The percentage of libraries that do use free or open source software to create their online literacy tutorials ranged from a low of 16.67 percent, in private college libraries, to a high of 77.78 percent, in research university libraries.