FW: Information Literacy for Russian Majors and Beginning Graduat e Students

[Brewer, Michael]

All,

I am a Slavic Studies librarian.  I am working with a professor on creating
some basic instruction sessions and a website dealing with information
literacy for the advanced level Russian student.  Basically, I would like to
determine what proficiencies a Russian major should be able to demonstrate
upon graduation (or, what proficiencies an introductory graduate student
should begin study with).  I am most interested in those skills and
knowledge that can be easily ascertained, not the certainly important, but
nonetheless vague and difficult to quantify like, "having an understanding
of 19th century Russian social customs," or the "evolution of the Russian
literary language from Petr pervyi to Platonov."

Have any of you as researchers, professors, or librarians (or students!),
thought about the particular skills students of Russian need to have to
succeed as scholars, researchers, or graduate students that are specific to
Russian/Slavic?

I would be interested in hearing from people who have dealt with this,
thought about this issue/topic, or have had to bring their department in
line with a university-wide movement toward learning outcomes assessment or
some other similar movement .  Do your Russian/Slavic programs have a
defined set of proficiencies that their students are to have at graduation?
Have these been clearly enunciated?  Do your departments have a "capstone"
course?  What are the goals of this course and how are they assessed?  What
particular skills to your "research methods" courses (if you have one
devoted to this) cover?  Is there a library element?

Obviously, oral proficiency is what departments have focused on to this
point, this and an understanding of Russian literature, criticism, culture,
history, etc., things often harder to quantify.

Some proficiencies I have thought of to this point are:

1.  Proficiency with the major transliteration systems and a knowledge of
the general trends in the transcription of Russian into the major European
languages.  (This is required not only for writing/reading citation
information, but can be crucial when doing advanced research).

2.  Russian computing/Cyrillic in cyberspace -- students need to know the
ins and outs of computing in Russian, using Cyrillic in the cyberspace
environment (a knowledge and understanding of fonts, keyboards, encodings,
searching with Cyrillic, typing in Russian, e-mail and Cyrillic, webpage
creation in Cyrillic or other scripts, etc.)

3.  Major (MLA, Chicago, etc.) style and citation guidelines for print and
electronic format.  (This is, unfortunately, often taken for granted by
professors.  As a former managing editor of a small scholarly journal, I
know that
many otherwise top quality graduate students are not proficient in this
area).

4.  Library (and Web) literacy.  A knowledge of the major print, electronic
and web resources that cover Russian/Slavic studies and how to use them
well.  A knowledge of the major journals, associations, national
conferences, etc.

5.  Employment opportunities -- (Where is Russian needed outside of
academia?
What other skills might be required? Where does a graduate find a job?)
Grants,
Fellowships, Internships (what is available, where to find them.  How to
write a grant application)  Writing a quality CV.  Interviewing.

Are there others any of you can think of?

If your departments have any sort of documents/websites, etc. detailing any
of this information (the proficiencies they expect their students to have at
graduation) please let me know.

Thanks,

Michael Brewer

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