By Russell Garth

Just over 15 years ago, when the National Forum on Information Literacy was established, I was the lone higher education association representative in the Forum’s semi-annual meetings in Washington, DC; and I could find only isolated pockets of interest in this topic within the CIC membership. How that has changed. Today information literacy is the core subject of CIC’s extremely popular workshops on the Transformation of the College Library and it is becoming an increasingly important goal for student learning at many colleges and universities.

Growing Understanding

Librarians have been the primary activists on this issue. An American Library Association (ALA) task force provided an early nudge with its 1989 report, and many campus librarians now refer to “information literacy” (instead of “bibliographic instruction”) when teaching students how to use library resources and gain research skills. The ALA’s current definition of information literacy (“set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information”) has been given broader meaning and immediacy by the sweeping technological developments of the past decade.

Morningside College (IA) illustrates how much the concept has evolved. Long attentive to educational implications of the information explosion, the librarians there had begun using the term, “information literacy,” prior to the ALA report; but it took a curriculum revision process during 2001–2004 and participation in a CIC workshop to achieve acceptance of this language throughout the institution.

Recently, other organizations have joined with the librarians in promoting information literacy. When Immaculata University (PA) sent faculty to workshops on this topic sponsored by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Consortium for Higher Education, the chief academic officer also gave all department chairs a copy of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools publication, Developing Research and Communication Skills: Guidelines for Information Literacy in the Curriculum. Significantly, all six of the regional accrediting organizations now assert the importance of information literacy (sometimes described as “use of library and information resources”). At Immaculata, a task force has designed a curriculum—to be implemented this fall—that includes information literacy competencies in two required first-year courses, English composition and world civilization. York College of Pennsylvania has also made information literacy course-specific. A recent general education revision was the occasion to add a two-credit-hour information literacy course as one of five courses in the 16-credit core curriculum.

Embedded in the Curriculum

A growing institutional approach features joint ventures involving librarians and faculty members to embed information literacy throughout the curriculum. The Center for Faculty and Curriculum Development at Illinois Wesleyan University offers workshops for faculty on information literacy and critical thinking. Elmhurst College (IL) also uses faculty workshops, organized by its librarians and offered twice each year, as starting points. Many of these faculty members collaborate with librarians in planning courses, offering sessions in classes, or bringing classes to the library. In a recent year, Elmhurst librarians participated in approximately 200 courses (representing nearly one-third of all course offerings and including 25 percent of the faculty). One important result, noticeable when students later use the library for research, is that they now know at least one librarian personally. Earlham College (IN) has employed a similar approach (instruction in 36 percent of all classes) and also has a teaching lab in the library. Morningside’s multifaceted approach includes instruction in several required first-year courses as well as opportunities for departments and individual faculty members, working with library staff, to incorporate information literacy competencies in disciplinary courses.

Strategies that encourage collaborative work between faculty members and librarians have benefits beyond students’ enhanced information literacy. These approaches reassert the importance of the library, along with the classroom and laboratory, as an essential environment for learning. Librarians also gain stature within the institution, as partners of faculty members and as scholars, whose subject matter is how to discover, manage, and interpret information. At Morningside, the tutoring staff now uses offices in the library (replacing the information technology staff), a move that further signals the teaching role of the library. Elmhurst librarians even assumed the role of teachers of the faculty about technology issues.

Important next steps can be seen at Marywood University (PA), where the academic vice president asks all faculty members to include their efforts to promote information literacy and diversity, along with teaching, research, and service in their annual activities reports. Marywood and the University of Scranton (PA) are also adapting an instrument developed by King’s College (PA) to assess student progress in the development of information literacy, and York has begun using an online questionnaire that asks faculty members whether they have seen changes in student information literacy capacities. It is no wonder, with all of this interest and activity on campuses, that applications in CIC’s workshops continue to outpace the numbers that can be accommodated.