MISSION AND VISION
As a tenured faculty and an experienced Research Services Librarian at the Georgia Southern University Libraries, my mission to assist faculty, undergraduates, and graduates, especially those first-year junior students, to access and locate online and printed information when they need. To improve their academic performance and future career development, I am committed to promoting information literacy competencies in a service-oriented and student-centered academic learning environment.
During my instructional practices, I have been focusing on ways of information delivery and knowledge discovery in academic learning environment. While assisting Georgia Southern faculty and students to search for peer-reviewed scholarly information, I have been paying close attention to fostering specific skills of critical thinking, decision-making, problem solving, and life-long learning. During the course of retrieving the full-text information, I have been encouraging students to use EBSCO Discovery Service, instead of a general Google search engine, to find out the full-text and peer-reviewed academic journal articles, dissertations and theses, e-books, scholarly researches, technical reports, white papers, etc. Whenever possible, I also promote information discovery by using other GALILEO databases, GIL-Find Catalogs, GIL Express, and ILL and Document Delivery services for Georgia Southern faculty, students and community users.
As we all know, the internet revolution flourished in the 1990s has thoroughly changed ways of information delivery and dissemination. Now, it is urgent for research services librarians in academic libraries to switch their roles from general subject specialists to information technology specialists. In the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), academic librarians should become pioneers to follow the developing trend in information technologies. Otherwise, they will lose their leaderships and strategic visions to generate more library creation and innovation in the coming years of the 21st century.