Independent Study_Visual Literacy 101

Posted October 6, 2025 by Aurora Daniel

For my final course this semester I’m working on an independent study on visual literacy instruction in Library and Information Science graduate programs that’s funded by the Simmons Center for Information Literacy (SCIL). When I started at SLIS, I hadn’t realized that there would be research opportunities for those in the MS program and just assumed that those would be reserved for doctoral students. Yet, with the launch of SCIL this past spring, there was a big push to encourage students to apply for funding
to work on group and individual projects. This brought to the forefront individual research projects for SLIS Masters students. After attending the info session in April, l I began to kick around ideas for a research project and settled on visual literacy because I’m interested in arts librarianship and archival practice and was curious what support was in place for emerging professionals to deliver visual literacy instruction.

I had to start working on this course over the summer, when I drafted a grant application proposal, project outline, and reached out to SLIS faculty about supervising this project. Additionally, I had to go through the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to make sure that my project didn’t pose any potential risks to the subjects involved in my study. While the steps in this process weren’t too laborious, as it was essentially filling out a few forms and shooting a couple of emails, I had to get started on it in July
because it took about a month to get approval from the various departments. Thankfully, everything worked out! SCIL approved funding for this project, I was able to get a faculty advisor, Dr. Botticelli, to serve as my advisor, and the IRB determined that this didn’t involve human subjects so I was given the greenlight to get started in early September.

My project has a few parts. First, I’m writing a literature review on visual literacy in Library and Information Science publications to see what resources are available to help aspiring and current professionals learn and implement visual literacy in their personal professional practic. Depending on time I have available, I may also make a Libguide for the Simmons Library out of this as a deliverable so that my research is accessible to those outside of library science and academia. The next part is looking at visual literacy instruction at Simmons SLIS. Specifically I’m looking at LIS 507: Museum Studies and LIS 446: Art Documentation, but will also be looking at LIS 408 User Instruction & Information Literacy to see to what extent it’s in a general course about Information Literacy. Depending on the findings, SLIS’ inclusion of visual literacy in its curriculum will serve as a case study for LIS education more broadly. Finally, I’m also conducting a survey of U.S.-based ALA-accredited institutions to determine how frequent they include visual literacy instruction in their curriculum. This is the most difficult part because there’s survey fatigue and at the moment the response rate is really low. So I have to be proactive about getting professors, deans, and administrators to fill this out.

So far I’ve really enjoyed working on a self-driven project. It’s been nice to dedicate more time to a subject that I know the practical applications of but less about the theory and academic literature on. Additionally, I’m glad that I’ll be able to produce a LIS research paper over the course of my studies that could potentially get published or serve as a sample of what I can write for prospective job applications that want a candidate that contributes to professional LIS literature. While that is embedded in the History Masters degree it’s something that’s optional for LIS and, as much as possible, I want to be prepared for anything that’s asked of a candidate when I start to apply for jobs this upcoming spring.