With digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly challenging how information is gathered and analyzed, York University Libraries is introducing a bold new curriculum to revolutionize student research.
To help students navigate today's complex information environment, the libraries have launched "Think, Research, Create: Introduction to Library Research," a four-part online series for undergraduate students.
The program aims to strengthen foundational research skills, including sourcing, citation and critical evaluation of digital and academic materials.
York University Libraries has a vast and continually expanding collection of print and digital materials, and accessing the right information requires increasingly sophisticated tactics, says Dana Craig, teaching and learning librarian.
"Information and digital literacy have changed so much in the last five to 10 years. There's so much more students need to be aware of," she says.
Developed by Craig and her colleagues in the library's Student Learning and Academic Success department - Sophie Bury, Cora Coady, Kalina Grewal and Jenna Stidwill - the curriculum responds to the growing need for advanced information literacy in an age shaped by AI, misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
"Think, Research, Create" guides students through York's extensive holdings, which include 4.4 million books - 1.8 million of which are electronic - and thousands of academic journals, databases and free internet sources.
Historically, librarians delivered a 50-minute in-class presentation to students on how to use the library upon invitation from faculty. But, with the rise of AI search tools and proliferation of digital sources, the libraries recognized a need for more robust teaching.
"In the conventional presentation, we can only explain how to use the libraries at a basic, superficial level," says Lisa Sloniowski, a teaching and learning librarian who helped facilitate the project in her previous role as the department's interim director. "Students don't learn enough to become competent researchers and understand the full scale of resources available to them and struggle with knowing what's appropriate to use." Each 90-minute workshop in the new series covers a distinct skill set related to information and digital literacy:
- Conquering information overload: making sense of different sources - including who created them and for which purposes - and correctly attributing creators.
- Kickstarting your research: developing clear, focused research questions and learning strategies to find reliable, relevant sources.
- Questioning everything: critically evaluating the veracity of sources using fact-checking methods and AI tools.
- Create to communicate ethically: producing meaningful content for scholarly works that respect copyright rules and the sensibilities of intersectional audiences.
In these interactive classes, undergraduates build their knowledge of information search techniques through hands-on activities, discussions and quizzes.
"With this expanded format, we have time to show students how information originates and travels, and to engage them in practising with different types of search frameworks," Craig says.
The classes are geared to first- and second-year students, but senior undergraduate and graduate students may also benefit from an overview of foundational information literacy issues and skills.
Additional faculty- or discipline-specific workshop series are in development for the 2026-27 academic year for third- and fourth-year students.
At the graduate level, Sloniowski offers a required six-week pass/fail course titled Literary Research Methods in the graduate program in English. The course surveys core and emerging literary research methods, introduces specialized databases and sources, and examines the historical role of libraries and archives as laboratories and critical infrastructure for humanities research. The goal is to expand this approach to other humanities graduate programs.
In the Faculty of Health's School of Nursing, Librarian Ilo Maimets has contributed to a systematic and scoping review course, which has potential to expand across graduate departments.
The new pedagogical model for research methods was guided by York's Sheril Hook, associate dean of teaching and learning and seasoned information studies scholar and practitioner, over the last three years with Teaching & Learning librarians. Their process involved studying the practices at university libraries in Canada as well as Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
The curricula follow the framework for information literacy developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.
Five teaching and learning librarians deliver the classes via synchronous Zoom sessions. By the end of this term, they will have taught the first three classes 10 times and the fourth class eight times. Sloniowski and Craig encourage faculty to have students register for the classes and consider assigning a grade for participation; however, they note that students from any department can independently choose to register.
Students will earn a certificate of completion for each class.
"Driven by a desire to provide all students with access to our classes, we opted to create a series of classes that any student could choose to attend. We put the student first in our model," Hook says.
As ongoing innovations in AI continue to fundamentally reshape the way information is accessed, Sloniowski sees these new curricula as pivotal to supporting the scholarly journey of York students.
"We can certainly see that the world is in a kind of epistemological crisis around information, and many feel ill-equipped to analyze the vast quantities of information coming at them. Artificial intelligence is only exacerbating this challenge," Sloniowski says. "Our pedagogical programming is shifting in this direction to help people deal with this social crisis of knowledge and to deepen our involvement in helping students become academically successful, effective researchers."
This story was originally featured in YFile, York University's community newsletter.
