Love and break-up letters to a library research skills tutorial

The 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 information literacy teaching tools designed for self-directed learning.