The Information Literacy Department is part of the University Libraries' Public Services Division. Read more about our role in the libraries and the concepts we teach.

The Metaliteracy Badging System offers students a chance to earn virtual badges to show off their learning by completing challenges and quests with metacognitive elements. Badges can be assigned for credit.

There are a variety of tools available for sharing what you know about a topic. Consider incorporating an application from this curated list compiled by educator Kathy Schrock when creating your next presentation or engaging in a creative exercise if you are having trouble putting words on paper.

Open Media Lab, created by professors at SUNY Old Westbury, provides tutorials on capturing, collecting, distributing and editing multimedia content using a variety of freely available software. The Student Projects section features inspiring examples of impactful multimedia storytelling.

In this activity from the Metaliteracy Badging site, you will learn about scholarly sources and the peer review process that they undergo. Scholarly sources are situated within a conversation among scholars, and you will be prompted to envisage how you might submit your own work for peer review. Contact Trudi Jacobson for details on how to take full advantage of the interactive features of this site.

This video discusses peer-reviewed articles and shows you how to find them with the library’s resources.

In this interactive video tutorial, you will learn what plagiarism is, its consequences, and how to avoid it.

Part 2 of the Plagiarism 101 tutorial. 

Part 3 of the Plagiarism 101 tutorial. 

Plagiarism is the use of someone else's words or ideas without giving proper credit to the original author. This tutorial will introduce you to different types of plagiarism and offer resources to help you avoid plagiarism in your work.

The following two guides provide a quick review of what types of sources are considered primary vs. secondary in science. 

The following two guides provide a quick review of what types of sources are considered primary vs. secondary in the humanities and social science disciplines.

Learning to paraphrase correctly is an important skill for avoiding plagiarism. This tutorial from the Harvard Graduate School of Education will help you learn what you need to know.

This video explains the various terminology and links onscreen in the article view of an academic database, and then describes the major elements of an academic article.

Looking for a starting place for your research? The Research by Subject page will lead you to librarian-recommended resources organized by discipline.

This is a collection of resources including academic articles on various scientific topics provided by the United States government agencies.

Use Boolean Operators, parenthesis, quotation marks, and truncation to craft an effective keyword search in a database or Google Scholar.

Learn how to use limiters and advanced search features in an academic database. Find peer-reviewed articles, enter a date range, narrow by subject, search by author, and search within the abstract.

Learn how to find books and articles using the library's search tool.

This video shows how to link the University at Albany libraries to a Google Scholar search, and briefly describes a few useful features of Google Scholar.

Use the University at Albany Libraries website to find the list of databases available for your research.

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play -- with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn't).

This free, open course will help you learn more about what information literacy is and how to teach it effectively. No matter your discipline or field of study, if you are interested in helping students learn to interact with information confidently, this course is for you. 

The ACRL Framework is the central defining document for information literacy, expanding on and deepening previous notions about what it means to be information literate. Featured concepts include “Information Has Value,” “Searching is Strategic Exploration,” and “Scholarship is a Conversation."

This open online textbook was edited and authored primarily by librarians in our department. Each chapter covers a concept related to information literacy and includes an activity that can be used to assess students’ learning