Librarians as Drivers of Academic Integrity for Student Success at University

ABSTRACT

Concerted efforts are being directed towards academic integrity in Australia’s higher education sector. University students encounter many challenges as they progress through their tertiary studies. Some of those challenges are seemingly allayed by increasingly easy opportunities to engage in deliberate or inadvertent unethical scholarly behaviours, such as contract cheating, plagiarism, or collusion. Academic librarians have much expertise to offer to the development and implementation of sustainable and scalable learning and teaching strategies as part of university-wide approaches to managing academic integrity. This article offers a case study of the development and trial of an educative strategy by a library at an Australian regional university in the form of a self-paced, online learning activity for coursework students. It demonstrates the important role of libraries and librarians in contributing to the development of evidence-based, educative approaches for preventing and reducing incidents of academic misconduct. The case study shows the critical role of librarians in engaging with students and staff in awareness raising and capacity building around ethical scholarly behaviour as students work towards those graduate attributes that form the basis for professional integrity. The article also confirms the valuable contribution librarians make to learning, teaching, and research beyond traditional academic understandings of the role of librarians.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic integrity
• academic librarians
• online learning
• referencing
• information literacy
• digital literacy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the help and support of Clare Thorpe, Director, Library Services, Southern Cross University, in developing the case study and editing this article. Thanks also goes to the team of Liaison Librarians in Education Support at USQ Library for their enthusiastic contribution to the development of and support for the USQ Academic Integrity Tool.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lyndelle Gunton

Lyndelle Gunton at the time of writing, Lyndelle Gunton was a Library Manager at the University of Southern Queensland Library. She has a strong interest in evidence-based library practice and has more than two decades of experience in academic libraries as an advocate for information and digital literacies as a critical part of student success.