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“The IS Awards Committee chose the Bucknell University World War II Poster Project because of its creative and collaborative approach to research, information literacy and technological skills within the context of an introductory history course and a special collection,” said award committee Co-chair Emily Rogers, assistant professor and reference librarian at Valdosta State University.

“Students worked hands on with original World War II-era posters from the university’s archives to develop proficiency at describing, researching, analyzing, digitizing and cataloging them,” said Rogers. “This project helped students to understand the importance of arranging and describing information, to develop richer understanding of visual representations of history and to appreciate collaboration among teaching and library faculty and staff. In the words of Diane Graves, university librarian at Trinity University, ‘Not only did the project introduce students to research tools and methods, it also brought them face to face with the reasons we do these things: to preserve and describe materials for the historical record—and for generations to come.’”

In an effort to find creative ways to develop students’ research, information literacy and technology skills within the context of a course, Del Testa and Clobridge developed the World War II Poster Project as a six-week learning module embedded in an introductory history course, History 100: Thinking about History, which focused on World War II. For the culmination of the project, students wrote papers and built a small, publicly available repository of digital images of the posters and notes about their research. The best student papers are included in a digital library located at

The World War II Poster Project has led to the development of two distinct pedagogical models, both of which can be adapted by library staff at other institutions independent of the posters themselves. While developing the unit, Clobridge and Del Testa mapped the project’s instructional activities to the ACRL information literacy standards and the regional accreditation standards for information literacy from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.