Background: In informatics courses, instructors often present materials in a didactic, module-by-module fashion; however, they may not readily integrate outside materials to facilitate learning. This may be due to a lack of time or expertise in identifying appropriate external resources. Librarians are uniquely suited to address this gap.

Setting/Participants: A librarian (D.B.) and a digital curation fellow (M.B.) taught a graduate level course on computational methods in health informatics. Students were mainly from basic science and informatics programs and had varying levels of computational experience.

Purpose: The objective of the course was to promote critical thinking about various algorithmic approaches to working with bioscience data. To encourage students to explore outside resources throughout the course, the instructors created an online subject guide containing summary-level information and online resources on the programming language R, data mining, and identification of bioscience datasets. A primary goal of the guide was to introduce students to resources that would lower barriers for them to learn to work with R. The guide was also designed to improve students’ ability to execute on their new knowledge of algorithmic approaches to data analysis. To optimize the usefulness of the guide for future course sessions, the instructors will conduct a formal assessment of how students interact with the materials.

Conclusion: Information professionals are uniquely suited to curating supplemental online resources in educational settings. Providing resources tailored to students’ changing information needs is an emerging opportunity for information professionals who wish to take an active role in fostering computational literacy.