Studying music in an online setting requires that students and instructors leverage digital resources and participatory technologies with understanding and intentionality. Meta-literacy, a framework promoting critical thinking and collaboration, is an inclusive approach to understanding the complexities of information use, production, and sharing in a digital environment. This chapter explores the implications of meta-literacy for the online music classroom and identifies ways in which the librarian and music instructor can collaborate to promote student self-reflection on the use, creation, and understanding of musical information or content.  

Librarians are frequently asked to “teach” several databases in a 1-shot session, despite findings suggesting that such database demonstrations do not lead to optimal student outcomes. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education highlights the concepts of metaliteracy and metacognition. This paper investigates ways in which I leveraged both of these concepts to reconcile my pedagogical ideals with an attempt to honor a faculty member’s request. By demonstrating question posing and making my own metacognitive processes transparent to students, I found that I could honor a faculty request for specific database demonstration while helping learners comprehend and see beyond the constructs of platform and format.