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Strategic business partnerships inform business faculty‐librarian (BFL) collaborations. This paper seeks to address how the motivations for business partnerships and faculty‐librarian collaborations are similar. A conceptual model suggests that the depth of the BFL relationship significantly enhances electronic collection development outcomes.

Literature concerning strategic business alliances, faculty‐librarian collaborations, and collection development was examined to determine whether principles that are applied to strategic business alliances can also be applied to BFL collaborations. A case‐in‐point is included for illustration.

Specific principles of strategic business partnerships can be applied to BFL collaborations aimed at improving electronic collection development. In addition, driving forces such as assessment, communication, and technology influence the nature of alliances across the business and academic arenas.

The findings are significant because they demonstrate how BFL collaborations can be made more effective through the application of business principles. BFL collaborations can positively influence electronic collection development in a variety of ways. The paper offers a new and unique conceptual model that improves understanding of the nature and depth of BFL collaborations in the context of electronic collection development. This paper will be of interest to business faculty in particular and faculty in general, and librarians working in diverse library settings, especially librarians aligned with management and business departments. Librarians in management positions will likely find this information useful as a means to increase faculty‐librarian collaboration across all disciplines.

This pilot aims to study a way of integrating research and writing support into a university course along with content. Research and writing skills are not taught explicitly in most university courses, yet these skills are increasingly required both in and outside of the classroom.

An embedded, collaborative instructional team comprising the instructor, librarians and writing specialists re-designed a first-year inquiry-based learning course, incorporating research and writing instruction throughout, formative and summative assessments and a flipped classroom model. At the end of the course, each member of the team reflected on their collaborative and individual experiences. The team also surveyed students to gauge their perceptions of the research and writing sessions.

The team learned from this experience and noted a large, but rewarding, time commitment. The flipped classroom model allowed the tailoring of instruction to students’ needs but required more work by librarians to prepare content and to grade. Students indicated appreciation for repeated interactions with librarians and reported confidence to use the skills taught.

Embedding librarians throughout the course with a writing specialist, as well as involvement in grading, is novel – this may be the first example in the literature of “deep integration”. The concept of “embedded librarianship” can be enhanced by expanding librarian and other support roles in a course.

Research is carried out in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Amassoma, Bayelsa State, Nigeria. The purpose of this paper is to determine the undergraduate students' level of awareness of information sources available in the university, to know their level of digital literacy and to determine the different search strategies used by them.

The paper adopts a descriptive survey method and covers the 350 undergraduate students of the four departments in the Faculty of Social Sciences: Economics, Sociology, Political Science, and Geography and Environmental Studies, from which a sample of 105 students is drawn. A questionnaire tagged “Information Literacy among Undergraduate Students of Social Sciences Questionnaire (ILUSSSQ)” is designed to collect data for the paper.

The paper reveals that male students in the faculty are more aware and use the information sources available in the university more than the female students. There is significant difference between gender and search strategies used by the undergraduate students in the social sciences. Male students are more digitally literate, they utilize the internet facilities provided in the university library, use different search engines and utilize the CD‐ROMs in the e‐library section more than the female students.

The paper will enable librarians to intensify their efforts to educate students on how and where to search and source for information, and how to evaluate information to meet their information needs.