Although fewer and fewer students are taking courses under the old Core Curriculum, there are still a fair number of transfer students who are not yet part of the GenEd curriculum. All of these students still taking the Core Curriculum were required to take and pass a library research tutorial called TILT, Temple’s Information Literacy Tutorial. But no more. As part of the President’s initiative to reduce the burdens of the University’s dysfunctional rules and policies, a decision was made to eliminate the TILT requirement. Here is the exact language of the Committee that voted on the change: The Education Programs and Policies Committee of the Faculty Senate agreed to revise the Core Curriculum at their November 19th meeting: • the Temple Information Literacy Tutorial (TILT) will no longer be required to graduate. This change is effective immediately, i.e. this applies to Core students graduating January 2010 and forward. Since this is effective immediately the Temple University Libraries will remove the presence of TILT from our website. As we move forward, current and new students will learn how to become effective researchers through the GenEd program. Though TILT served us well and is now going away, self-guided tutorials do have their place in learning effective research methods. We will continue to develop instructional tutorials and other materials that will help students to become better researchers through self-guided methods.

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) initiated its Primary Source Awards program in the fall of 2009. Primary Source Awards recognize the contributions of research and teaching faculty, librarians and library staff, graduate students, and others within the CRL community for their creative use of primary source materials in three arenas: research, teaching, and access. The awards will enable staff at CRL libraries to share creative strategies for the usage of materials in CRL’s major collecting areas: newspapers, archives, government documents, and journals. Awardees will receive a gift certificate for Powell’s Books. Awardees will be announced on March 1, 2010, and recognized at CRL’s Council of Voting Members Annual Meeting and other appropriate events, and publicized through CRL media. Nominators of the eventual awardees will receive an iPod touch. Online nominations can be submitted by research and teaching faculty, library staff, graduate students, and administrators within the CRL community and must be received by January 31, 2010. To submit your nomination or for more information, please visit http://www.crl.edu/primary-source-awards.