When the personal enables the independent: taking the library to the students

Western Sydney University has the most diverse, and also the most disadvantaged, student body of any university in Australia. First-year students are hampered in general, by a lack of preparation for the demands of university study, suffering a deficit in what could be termed Academic Motivational Literacy. They also, more specifically, typically arrive at university with little preparation for Information–Research Literacy. In practice, it means that these students are not only unfamiliar with library resources, they are not motivated to find out for themselves what is available on campus or online. In response to this need, many of these first-year students are expected to undertake a core Academic English literacy-skills subject, where independent research is an essential requirement. Rather than seeing student reluctance to seek out library resources as an agential decision, it was viewed as an opportunity to redress deficit through facilitative teaching. A collaborative project was then designed and funded in response to this need, which saw library staff attend hundreds of tutorials and actively team-teach the basics of research with unit tutors. The success of this project has seen it become a regular fixture in the academic calendar.