Michelle Keba Knecht

Michelle Keba Knecht is the Senior Medical Librarian and Head of the Medical Health Sciences Collection and User Services Department for the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University. In this position, she manages the College of Medicine library resources and provides leadership for the evidence-based medicine curriculum as the co-director of the Life-Long Learning & Discovery thread.

Prior to joining FAU, she served as an Associate Librarian for Reference at Palm Beach Atlantic University where she provided library services and taught undergraduate courses in the education and leadership departments as an adjunct professor. She has also held positions as an English language arts teacher on the Texas-Mexico border through the Teach for America program and as a Distance and Instructional Services Librarian at Nova Southeastern University where she and her co-workers won the Association of College and Research Libraries Instruction Section Innovation Award for their work creating LibraryLearn, a mobile-first platform for storing and displaying instructional videos.

Ms. Knecht’s scholarly work has focused on the affective dimensions of information literacy including the role of curiosity during the research process and information literacy misconceptions. Her scholarship in these areas has been published in College & Research Libraries, Communications in Information Literacy, and the Journal of Library and Information Services in Distance Learning. She has also presented at numerous conferences including the International Leadership Association Global Conference, European Conference on Information Literacy, Medical Library Association Annual Meeting, Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience, and American Library Association Annual Conference.

Education:
MS (2020) Leadership, Palm Beach Atlantic University
MS (2012) Information Studies, University of Texas at Austin
BA (2008) Anthropology Summa cum laude, University of Florida

Research & Interest:
• Evidence-Based Medicine
• Consumer Health Information
• Information Literacy Misconceptions
• Curiosity and Lifelong Learning

Recent Publications:
Knecht, M., (2022). Investigating nontraditional first-year students’ epistemic curiosity during the research process: An exploratory, mixed-methods study. College & Research Libraries, 83 (6), 874-886. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.874

Keba, M., & Fairall, E. (2020). Not a Blank Slate: Information Literacy Misconceptions in First-Year Experience Courses. Communications in Information Literacy, 14 (2), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.2.5

Keba, M. (2017). Teaching future educators exploration through strategic searching. In S. Goobey, S.B. Wainscott, & X. Goodman (Eds.), Disciplinary applications of information literacy threshold concepts. Chicago, IL: Association of College & Research Libraries.

Roy, L., & Keba, M. (2017). Internationalizing reference education. The Reference Librarian, 58(3), 206-213. doi: 10.1080/02763877.2016.1277124

Renirie, R.H. & Keba, M. (Eds.) (2016). The seventeenth distance library services proceedings. Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, 10(1-2).

Keba, M., Segno, J., & Schofield, M. (2015). Making it work: Creating a student-friendly repository for instructional library videos. Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, 9(1-2), 17-29. doi:10.1080/1533290X.2014.946335

Awards and Honors:
Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (Selected in 2018)
Association of College & Research Libraries Instruction Section Innovation Award (Selected in 2015)
Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute (Selected in 2014)
Distance Library Services Conference Award (Selected in 2014)
Phi Beta Kappa (elected 2008)