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Abstract

It is an honor to be with you here on this lovely campus. This is not my first trip to Indiana Wesleyan. I have many friends here and recently worked closely with Indiana Wesleyan’s faculty and staff in a major yearlong self-study and improvement planning process for the first year. I very much appreciate the invitation extended to me by Sheila Carlblom to reflect with you about your important role in Christian college settings and how what you do – helping students become knowledgeable and ethical seekers and consumers of information – is so important. In my remarks this morning, I want to reflect with you about the first year, the nature of today’s beginning students, and about the challenges we face in making information literacy a more central component of the first year. I also have questions about what it means to be a Christian librarian – honest questions that I want to explore with you in the context of the first year. Finally I want to facilitate a conversation between all of us about ways that you are currently integrating your work into the first year. But let me begin by practicing what I preach to faculty who teach first-year students by telling you a bit more about myself and how I more or less fell into a career focused on the first year.

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