New Student Resources: Transitioning to College

Are you a high school teacher wanting you bring your AP English classes for a visit? Learn more about our Research Days!

Contact: Lindsay Miller, First Year Experience Librarian.  

Even the best high school libraries and media centers look and work very differently than academic libraries.

Your high school library:

• was probably one room with one librarian who had a general knowledge of lots of subjects
• was only open during school hours, with help only available during those times
• only had a few online databases that were limited in scope, and very basic and geared toward school age students
• probably had filters or blocks on computers, limiting certain websites and searches
• held only a small collection of books on restricted subject areas, organized by the Dewey decimal system

The MU Libraries:

• have multiple locations specializing in different subject areas. All of our libraries are open late, offer online help, and King Library is open 7 am-1 am during the school year.
• employ over 40 librarians that have subject specialties and multiple master's degrees or a Phd in their area of study
• have access to 100s of databases, from general to extremely specific (medical, primary sources, newspapers, etc)
• organize our materials with the Library of Congress classification system (not the Dewey decimal)
• hold over 4 million books, but as a student you can borrow from any Ohio academic library and you can access thousands of e-books and other online resources

Information Literacy is defined as the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information.

Professors and librarians hope a first-year student can:

• Understand the value of finding evidence
• Identify keywords, synonyms, and related terms to describe information needs effectively
• Identify an author’s thesis / main point and basic structure of the information
• Understand the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing
• Understand what constitutes plagiarism