‘Babe… you're a bit of a know it all’:

Student love and breakup letters to a library research skills tutorial

Abstract

This study employed a novel user experience method, the love/breakup letter, to evaluate the usefulness of an online information literacy (IL) tutorial for students writing assignments with research requirements. Thematic coding of the letters showed that this method elicited revealing responses from students about their confidence in doing library research, preferred learning styles, and intentions to use such a tool again. In contrast with highly-favourable prelaunch user testing results, the majority of students wrote breakup letters to the tutorial and several bypassed it altogether despite their explicit assignment instructions. The findings have implications for librarians exploring new research methods and investigating practical applications of online IL teaching tools designed for self-directed learning.