In my January 2023 message, I wrote: “As advocates of unfettered access to information and knowledge and consistent promoters of the idea that cost should not be a barrier to such access, your university library enthusiastically embraces the availability of free and open educational resources as teaching and learning tools that guarantee unfettered access to students, lower educational costs, expand opportunity, and further the goal of attaining equity.” I reassured our community of Cheng Library’s unflinching support as our users pursued their information and knowledge acquisition activities toward academic success and intellectual readiness. The challenges posed by high textbook costs continue to loom large on the minds of students and those looking to contain costs in higher education. Open Educational Resources (OER) present an opportunity to address this concern and the librarians at Cheng Library work hard to provide resources and advocacy for the adoption and scaling of OER resources across curricular offerings. There has been some success, but much still remains to be done to ensure that the burden of textbook costs is significantly reduced for our students and ceases to be a persistent item in their complaints. To achieve that, we need more zero cost materials in offerings at all levels and especially those that reach large student populations and are mandatory. That would be a significant accomplishment.
So, as we enter 2024, we revisit an old and vexing issue, perhaps much more familiar now, but requiring renewed commitment and attention to resolve. As noted, Cheng librarians have created tools and gathered resources to aid the effort. They remain enthusiastic about helping their classroom colleagues offer our students a financial relief they so often desire and an academic leg up they often so desperately need to facilitate their success. Our librarians have created targeted guides to help classroom faculty navigate the myriad of open textbooks available, applying their professional knowledge to the vetting of reliable, high-quality resources and supplementing those with a willingness and availability to work one-on-one with any faculty open to selecting, editing, and creating texts they are comfortable offering to replace paid items many of their students find unaffordable. As advocates of unfettered access to information and knowledge, librarians are comfortable doing our part to support our colleagues in a bid to help students who appreciate the lowering of textbook costs in a world of ever increasing higher educational costs. We invite our classroom colleagues to embrace our collaboration and engage us more in their textbook selection and adoption process. It is worth mentioning that while low-cost textbooks and instructional materials may be appealing in some instances, the greatest cost relief we can provide our students will lie in zero cost options.
Your Library’s embrace of, and belief in, the power of information literacy to prepare effective current and lifelong learners remains paramount to its educational role. In January 2023 we were still preoccupied with fake news and its potential to undermine social and academic norms. The end of 2023 saw the reemergence of the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for the future of higher education. 2024 rolls in with artificial intelligence as an even greater force to reckon with. To librarians operating in the landscape of information and knowledge and their application to scholarly communications, the new is strikingly similar to the old. Matt Ennis (“Next Gen AI: Libraries Work with ChatGPT and Other Emerging AI Tools”) rightly observes: “Aside from their personal interest or concerns, librarians will need to be prepared to help patrons use AI tools, answer questions about them, and in many cases, help their institutions navigate emerging issues including academic honesty and broader ethical concerns, such as potential built-in biases or the current lack of transparency and sourcing.” The AI tool ChatGPT chimes in with an insightful comment: “Overall, AI is transforming university libraries by improving information retrieval, providing personalized recommendations, optimizing resource management, enhancing the user experience, enabling data-driven decision-making, and fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing. These advancements ensure that libraries continue to play a vital role in supporting academic research, teaching, and learning in the digital age” (quoted by Hannah Herrlich in “The Future of Libraries: AI and Machine Learning”).
However, as Herrlich (“The Future of Libraries”) notes, “there is a fundamental feature absent from the design of AI technology - The human touch. Though these systems are designed to act human, they are not, and humans remain in control of these technologies.” The challenge, Herrlich concludes, is to understand that “AI is here to stay and as a result, it is something that we, as librarians, researchers, and humans must learn to work with and not against in order to build a future inclusive of information technologies that strive for a more sustainable world.” As it was with concerns about fake news, the challenges of AI present opportunities within information literacy education to contextualize and promote a meaningful approach to AI within higher education. That can begin with engaging students with “the implications for information literacy and academic integrity of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT” write Yingshen Huang, Andrew Cox, and John Cox (“Artificial Intelligence in Academic Library Strategy in the United Kingdom and the Mainland of China”). Cheng Library embraces the challenges and opportunities presented by our new educational realities and looks forward to campuswide collaborations to meet emerging tasks.
It is worth reiterating that as teaching modalities at William Paterson University become more diversified, your Cheng Library colleagues have supported and remain willing to enthusiastically support the diverse teaching environments. We are convinced that a good online teaching-learning environment needs as good an information literacy component as any good in-person experience. We invite our classroom colleagues to work with us to translate this into reality for our students. Good, reliable information use and creation requires good, reliable information and knowledge seekers and creators to be discriminate in their information seeking and use behaviors. Librarians support society and its members by identifying, aggregating, mediating, and providing assistance in the navigation, selection, and use of scientifically vetted and academically endorsed information and knowledge of acceptable veracity for the recreation of further information and knowledge with the goal of informing the human quest and commitment to intellectual pursuits. To achieve this critical outcome within the sphere of higher education, the academic library has to work with faculty and students to explore avenues to improve student information and knowledge acquisition and use skills and aptitudes. This is the driving force behind Cheng Library’s continued encouragement of its classroom colleagues to welcome into their classroom environments librarians with the knowledge and expertise to transform students into effective and independent information and knowledge seekers and users. Participation in class environments provide a great opportunity for librarian-faculty collaboration and engagements aimed at reaching such an objective. The experience can be in-person or virtual, depending on teaching modality and instructor preference and in consultation with librarians.
To conclude, the old still appears new and the newest resembles a past vexation reincarnated in a more elusive form that requires greater vigilance and adaptability to mold into productive form. That should be a welcome challenge for all educators, including librarians and their classroom counterparts. Common concerns call for united efforts to resolve.
Happy New Year!
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