Librarians and the Case for Information Literacy Instruction

Thoughts from the Dean of Cheng Library, Dr. Edward Owusu-Ansah

     Student retention, persistence, success, and excellence have always been on the minds of educators. Most recently, they have been articulated with even greater urgency as William Paterson University places these objectives at its core with renewed focus and attention. It is perhaps an opportune time for Cheng Library to address one specific way in which the library seeks most directly to impact student learning and success: through its instruction efforts. As an entity at the crossroads of higher education’s core functions of ensuring knowledge facilitation, acquisition, and advancement, the academic library has always been a supporter and guarantor for the success of these functions. Its information literacy instructional efforts have represented one of its most effective avenues for directly addressing core critical thinking aspects, and lifelong learning components, of student success and excellence.

     To understand what the library brings to the table in the information literacy education of our students, it is perhaps best to clarify the specifics of its objectives and potential contributions in this area. To do so, I will begin by acknowledging Rutgers University professor and former president of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Tefko Saracevic’s reminder regarding the rampant futility of definitional efforts and submit to Karl Popper’s insistence that we are primarily not students of some subject matter, but rather students of problems. I will accordingly begin with an enumeration of the problems instructional librarians mostly address, to clarify the specific objectives that have brought the library into the domain of information literacy instruction. These may be reasonably identified in the academic library’s established mandate to help students:

  • Select topics and establish specific foci for their research.
  • Frame research questions, statements of purpose and thesis statements.
  • Determine nature, scope, and depth of information needs.
  • Understand the process of the flow of information.
  • Establish what kind of information is appropriate and why.
  • Determine which resources to use for the retrieval of relevant information items.
  • Formulate strategies for location and retrieval of those items.
  • Develop a checklist and skills for preliminary screening, evaluation, and selection from a pool of retrieved items.
  • Appreciate and understand the concept of intellectual property and its implications for research.
  • Present assembled information and knowledge in appropriate form with proper attribution and required citation styles.
  • Understand, appreciate, and apply the legal and ethical parameters attending the use of information.

     Some of these objectives and associated activities involve easily gained skills; some involve sophisticated cognitive processes and conceptual understanding. They may be viewed as service aptitudes or competencies that enable higher level intellectual operations. They belong to the broader context of general education, and that general education link was perhaps best expressed by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools in its Characteristics of Excellence in Higher Education (2011): “General education incorporates essential knowledge, cognitive abilities, and an understanding of values and ethics, and it enhances students’ intellectual growth. General education programs draw students into new areas of intellectual experience, expanding their cultural and global awareness and sensitivity, and preparing them to make enlightened judgments outside as well as within their academic specialty.  Information literacy - the understanding and set of skills necessary to carry out the functions of effective information access, evaluation, and application - is an essential component of any general education program.”

     In its 2002 standards, the Commission was more explicit on the role of libraries: “Information literacy—the understanding and set of skills necessary to carry out the functions of effective information access, evaluation, and application—is an essential component of any general education program and is promoted by the participation of professional library staff.” This critical role of information literacy in higher education is reiterated in the Commission’s latest and more succinct Standards for Accreditation and Requirements of Affiliation (2015). 

     Ilene F. Rockman (“Strengthening connections between information literacy, general education, and assessment efforts,” Library Trends, 2002) notes that the general education reform movement “has provided academic libraries with opportunities and possibilities to weave information literacy into both lower- and upper-division courses, redesign services, reshape librarian roles and responsibilities, and revisit with discipline-based faculty members about course descriptions and student assignments to include information literacy principles.” This need is as true today as it was in 1893, when William Poole (“The university library and the university curriculum,” Library Journal, November) wrote: “This facile proficiency does not come by intuition, nor from the clouds. Where else is it to be taught, if not in the college or university? With it, a graduate is prepared to grapple with his professional studies, to succeed in editorial work, or in any literary or scientific pursuit for which he may have the taste and qualification.”

     The instructional domain mapped out by librarians in information literacy instruction effectively responds to the need to equip information users with effective information access, evaluation and application skills, coupled with a recognition that librarians, by virtue of domain expertise and professional training and practice, are best suited to address the access and evaluation components of that need. Neal Harlow (“The library in the future of higher education,” in Rawski, Conrad H., Ed., Toward a theory of librarianship: papers in honor of Jesse Hauk Shera, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1973) categorizes those components as acquiry functions: “In teaching the process of independent study – the only permanent form of learning – the library will acquaint him with the function of information in inquiry… and familiarize him with informational sources. It will teach him to recognize and evaluate content and to understand the organization of the scholarly disciplines, the arrangement of material in libraries, and the pattern and utility of bibliographic structure and method. The students’ library, by accepting responsibility to manage the acquiry portion of the learning cycle, will become part of the educational process and place the library where the action is.”          

     President Frederick A. P. Barnard of Columbia College as early as 1883 recognized this role for librarians when he observed that systematic instruction offered by a college librarian “would so start our students in the right methods, that for the rest of their lives all their work in libraries would be more expeditiously accomplished and vastly more efficient.” Not long after Barnard, another university president, William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago (“The trend in higher education in America,” University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1905), bemoaning student deficiencies in the use of books and decrying that “they can find nothing; do not know how to proceed in order to find anything,” concluded that “the equipment of the library will never be finished until it have upon its staff men and women whose sole work shall be, not the care of books, not the cataloguing of books, but the giving of instruction concerning their use.”                                   

     The contemporary academic library has embraced this educational role, and here at William Paterson University, Cheng librarians are committed to and excited about this challenge and the opportunities it presents for student engagements and collaborations with classroom faculty. The focus is on the acquiry components of information literacy, with a recognition of the fact that the use dimension is best tackled within disciplinary contexts, with the library participating in the ethical dimensions of use and the avoidance of plagiarism. How to achieve the desired outcomes has been vigorously discussed in the professional literature. Pursuit of independent credit offerings have generally proven a tough sell. Course-integrated and related approaches have been more popular. Collaborations between classroom faculty and librarians have become the dominant approach.

     To achieve more elaborate engagement and to bring the library’s involvement in information literacy education into the mainstream of academic practice and make the collaborations even more effective, it may be wise to have the library-led components of information literacy assessed and graded. After all, in higher education, credit remains the imprimatur of legitimacy and the predominant currency of the realm. Perhaps it is time to begin the conversation on the design and incorporation of assignments to assess information literacy skills and aptitudes as disciplinary faculty and librarians collaborate to ensure student success, excellence, and readiness for lifelong learning.

January 30, 2019