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Take a Tour of OSLIS: Your Resource for Teaching Students the Research Process

bit.ly/OSLIS2026

Shelly Buchanan & Kristina Cevallos

OASL Fall Conference

Troutdale, OR

October 10, 2026

Shelly: Welcome, everyone. I'm so happy to see you all.

I’m Shelly Buchanan. I’ve served on the OSLIS management and development committee since 2012. I’m a former school librarian, and now I teach in the MLIS program at San José State University. Many of my students are working or future school librarians.

Kristina, I’m so happy to be presenting with you today! Would you introduce yourself?

Kristina: I’m Kristina Cevallos. I am in my fourth year as a teacher-librarian in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District. I have been a teacher-librarian in the middle and primary schools in the district. This year I am at Inza R. Wood Middle School.

Shelly: Today, Kristina and I are going to take you on a tour of the OSLIS website. It’s chock-full of lessons and information resources for teachers, school librarians, and elementary, middle, and high school students. As we go, we’ll think together about how these resources can help us teach students through the research process and where they might fit in the work you’re already doing.

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What is OSLIS?

Launched in 1998
Information literacy instruction
Maintained by dedicated volunteers
For students and educators
Hosts statewide subscription databases
Citation Maker
Click here for more on the history of OSLIS (post drafted 2025)

OSLIS is a partnership between:

and

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OSLIS Funding

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Grant funded
LSTA Grant (Library Services and Technology Act)
LSTA is under the umbrella of the IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services)
Grants are applied for, approved and administered annually
OSLIS Committee Chair and School Library Consultant conduct annual grant applications and reports

Shelly: Just a quick note about how this resource is supported. OSLIS receives funding through the Library Services and Technology Act, or LSTA. The grant application and reporting work happens every year, with the OSLIS committee chair, currently Molly Sloan, and the State Library’s school library consultant, our very own Jen Maurer, taking on much of that responsibility.

That work helps make OSLIS available to Oregon schools. The teaching and learning materials on the public site can also be used by people well beyond Oregon. The licensed resources have different access rules: the information literacy eBooks require a username and password, while Oregon users can often reach Gale databases through their school network or by selecting their school or district, without typing a password.

So if you’ve opened a Gale database from OSLIS without seeing a login screen, that may be why. Kristina will show us more about access in a moment.

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Using OSLIS in Your Library Role

Teacher - Librarian

Guide students through the research process
Encourage students to use Gale databases for reliable information
Utilize supporting materials to enhance your instruction
Help students create citations
Share resources with classroom teachers, parents & admin

Paraprofessional

Share OSLIS resources with classroom teachers, students, and families
Direct students to Citation Maker
Have bookmarks and information on websites for easy access

Classroom Teacher

Provide Information literacy instruction
No certified librarian in your school? These materials have been created by certified librarians
Use Gale resources to provide vetted and age appropriate information
Share Gale resources with families
Citation Maker

Shelly: One thing I appreciate about OSLIS is that there are several ways into it, depending on your role and the students you work with. A teacher librarian might use its research framework to plan a project with a classroom teacher, then return to a particular video or lesson when students need help. A paraprofessional might guide a student to Citation Maker, share a resource with a family, or help make the site easy to find. A classroom teacher can draw on materials developed by school librarians, including in a school without a certified librarian.

Please know that one doesn’t have to take on the whole site at once. You might begin with one resource, like a video or e-book, that answers a question students are already asking.

Kristina, what might sharing OSLIS look like for you and others in the flow of a school day?

Kristina: Let’s start with logging in . . .

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Accessing OSLIS

Big Timber Media - Cherry Lake Publishing Group eBooks

Media Literacy and Research Skills

Login: oregon / oslis (all lowercase)

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Elementary & Secondary Strands

TRANSLATE PAGE

SWITCH SITES

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Steps of the Research Process

(Found in the Learn To Research Section of the site)

Shelly: Here’s where I especially see OSLIS as a teaching partner. Both strands give students a way to see research as a process, with places to pause, make choices, and come back when they learn something new.

On the elementary side, the four steps are Plan, Find, Create, and Present. Plan begins with understanding the assignment, thinking about what you already know, and developing questions worth exploring. In Find, students choose and use sources, take notes, and keep track of where their information came from. Create asks them to organize what they’ve learned, draft something of their own, and revise it. Then, in Present, they share their learning and reflect on it. I like that reflection is there, even for young researchers.

The secondary strand names six steps: Define, Plan, Find, Create, Present, and Reflect. Giving Define its own place asks students to slow down before searching: What is the task? What do I already know? What am I really trying to find out? They can then plan a search strategy, find and evaluate information, make connections among sources, create and present their work, and reflect both on the project and on how they worked.

I wouldn’t teach these as boxes students check once and leave behind. A student may find a source that changes the question, or begin a draft and realize more information is needed. The steps give us shared language for those moments. Instead of simply saying, ‘Keep researching,’ we can ask, ‘Do we need to redefine the question? Try another kind of source? Look more carefully at what this source is telling us?’ That makes it easier to teach the thinking within a project, one decision at a time.

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Video Tutorials

(Found under the videos button on the

Learn to Research landing page)

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Video Tutorials

(Found under the videos button on the

Learn to Research landing page)

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New information literacy themed eBooks available!

eBooks

(Found under the eBooks button on the Learn to Research landing page)

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Access

Gale Databases

(Find Information Section)

Available to the Oregon K-12 Community

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Citation Maker

(Found in the Cite My Sources Section)

Shelly: Citation is sometimes the last thing students want to think about. I understand that: by the end of a project, they’re eager to be done. But I like to introduce citation much earlier, as part of what it means to build and share knowledge.

I sometimes tell students that we stand on the shoulders of giants. The researchers, writers, and other creators whose work helps us understand a topic make our own thinking possible. Naming those sources gives them credit, and it lets someone else follow the trail of our ideas.

There’s another kind of confidence in it for students, too. They can take a sturdy position about what they know when they can show where their information came from. And when they use Citation Maker, they have to stop and notice the source in front of them: Is this a book, an article, a website, or something else? Who created it? Where was it published? Those are research questions as well as citation questions.

Citation Maker helps students put that information into MLA or APA form. We still have a teaching role: helping them identify the source correctly, enter accurate details, and check the citation they get back.

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Educator Content

Spanish Translations

Quizzes

Available as Google Forms, Fillable PDFs and Word documents.

Quizzes with answer keys are available for videos

Worksheets

Worksheets to support skill practice for many of the videos

The OSLIS committee is working to provide Spanish translations of worksheets, posters, quizzes and keys.

Shelly: There’s material here for us as educators, too. Alongside many of the student-facing videos, you’ll find quizzes, answer keys, and worksheets that give students a chance to practice a particular skill. Some quizzes are available as Google Forms, fillable PDFs, or Word documents, so teachers have some choice in how to use them.

The committee is also doing ongoing work on Spanish translations, making more of these materials usable across our school communities. I have a personal connection to that work: one of the translators on this long-term project is a former middle school student of mine who is now at George Washington University. She happens to be one of those language geniuses. It’s lovely to see someone I once taught contributing to a resource that can now help other students learn.

Kristina: Make sure to check out the Educator Content. Not every video has quizzes and worksheets but you’ll discover many that do, which are helpful tools to use as a pre- or post-test (maybe as a formative assessment). . . there are even instructions on how to incorporate the PDFs and Word documents into Google Classroom.

(here are some resources available for teachers. The + sign is an accordian file that opens up when you click on it.)

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Questions & Bingo!

If you run into questions as you use OSLIS resources in your program, please feel free to email us.

Shelly: shelly.buchanan@sjsu.edu

Kristina: cevallosk@wlwv.k12.or.us

Jen Maurer: Jennifer.MAURER@slo.oregon.gov

bit.ly/OSLIS2026

BINGO Board

Shelly: That was a brief tour of OSLIS, and we hope you’ll leave with one place you want to explore more closely. Perhaps it’s a step in the research process, a video you could share with a class, or a new-to-you resource.

Questions? Kristina can speak to using OSLIS with students in a school right now, and I’m happy to talk through instructional possibilities and the work of developing the site.

Bingo up next, to give you a chance to explore OSLIS yourself.

Kristina: We have a BINGO board with different OSLIS related tidbits to help you explore the site for yourself. There is chocolate here to use as BINGO markers or just to take and enjoy. This is a self-paced exploration. Shelly and I are here to answer any questions.

(Great! We made it! Let’s Play! We made a bingo game to get you exploring the OSLIS site. If you get a bingo, you can have candy!!)

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