Capipus cultures fostering information literacy

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Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 147-167

  Bennett, Scott ^a  

^a Library Projects   (United States)

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EID: 34247613537     PISSN: 15312542     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. ©Scott Bennett, 2007. Readers of this paper and librarians may copy it without the copyright owner's permission if the author and publisher are acknowledged in the copy and the copy is used for educational, not-for-profit purposes.
2. This shift in value is the underlying theme of Cathy De Rosa's influential The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition. A Report to the OCLC Membership (Dublin: OCLC, 2004).
3. See, for instance, the National Center for Academic Transformation, directed by Carol A. Twigg, whose quarterly newsletter The Learning MarketSpace is available at this site: http://www.center.rpi.edu/subscribe. htm (accessed January 25, 2007).
4. Applicant to a CIC/NITLE workshop on information literacy. The workshops are described in this paper; application statements and other data gathered in conjunction with the workshops are used with the permission of the Council of Independent Colleges and are treated as confidential with regard to personal or institutional identities. Opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Council of Independent Colleges, the National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education, or participants in the CIC/NITLE workshops.
5. The author is a senior advisor to the CIC for its library programs and has had a significant role in designing and conducting the workshops. The same is true for CIC's two other senior advisors for library programs: Rita Gulstad, interim vice president and dean of the university at Central Methodist University and Thomas Kirk, library director and coordinator of information services at Earlham College. The workshops have been conducted under the direction of Mary Ann Rehnke, vice president for programs, Council of Independent Colleges.
6. The professional literature on information literacy is voluminous, and no systematic effort is made here to give an account of it. An excellent point of entry is the Web site maintained by the Association of College and Research Libraries, "ACRL Information Literacy," http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/ acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm (accessed January 11, 2007).
7. The ACRL "test" is available at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/ acrlissues/acrlinfolit/professactivity/iil/immersion/infolitiqtest.htm (accessed January 11,2007). It was devised by Cerise Oberman, Bonnie Gratch-Lindauer, and Lizabeth A. Wilson. See Oberman et al., "Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum: How Is Your Library Measuring Up?" C&RL News 59, 5 (May 1998): 347-52.
8. The workshops have benefited from a continuous quality improvement regimen, one result of which is that the application information for the 2004 and 2005-06 applications got somewhat different kinds of analyses after institutions had been accepted for the workshops. Post-acceptance analysis of the 2004 workshop applications was generally less systematic and cannot be directly merged with the more detailed post-acceptance analysis of the 2005-06 applications. In the present case, among the 60 institutions accepted for the 2004 workshops, 43 percent reported information literacy activities aimed at first-year students, whereas 34 percent reported having in-class instruction offered in response to faculty requests. Institutions also reported information literacy activities attached to core courses fulfilling liberal arts distribution requirements (26 percent) and some activities designed for specific majors (13 percent). Only 12 percent of the institutions reported maintaining first-year orientation programs.
9. This essay was written in the summer of 2006, long before it was possible to send the one-year follow up survey to those attending the 2005-06 workshops, the last of which was in April 2006.
10. That only 16 percent of the institutions support or reward faculty who take initiatives in information literacy may be seen, in some part, as a consequence of so few of the institutions having formalized information literacy as part of their thinking about and planning for the curriculum.
11. Collaboration among faculty and academic support staff has long been understood to be a key factor in successful information literacy programs. See, for instance, the excellent collection of essays edited by Dick Raspa and Dane Ward, The Collaborative Imperative: Librarians and Faculty Working Together in the Information Universe (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000). These authors' initial essay, "Listening for Collaboration: Faculty and Librarians Working Together," 1-18, is especially worth reading.
12. This account of the Bryn Mawr workshop draws heavily on Johnathan Church, "Reimagining Professional Identities: A Reflection on Collaboration and Techno-Pedagogy," a report under the publications tab at the Web site "Talking Toward Techno-Pedagogy," http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/ talking/ (accessed January 11, 2007).
13. Ibid. All the following direct quotations are from Church's report
14. For additional commentary on how academic roles are defined in ways that inhibit programs of information literacy, see Larry Hardesty, "Faculty Culture and Bibliographic Instruction: An Exploratory Essay," Library Trends 44, 2 (Fall 1995): 339-67;
15. William B. Badke, "Can't Get No Respect: Helping Faculty to Understand the Educational Power of Information Literacy," Reference Librarian 89/90 (2005): 63-80.
16. For a discussion of the transformation of traditional professional roles as an aspect of the way higher education manages claims to authority over knowledge, see Scott Bennett, "First Questions for Designing Higher Education Learning Spaces," forthcoming, Journal of Academic Librarianship, January 2007.
17. While it is useful to categorize the information provided in the workshop applications, even in the absence of a controlled vocabulary, the results must be seen as approximations and no further statistical analysis would be meaningful.
18. Post-acceptance analysis of the 2004 workshop applications was generally less systematic and cannot be directly merged with the more detailed post-acceptance analysis of the 2005-06 applications. However, among the 60 successful applicants for the 2004 workshops, curricular redesign was mentioned by 53 percent of the respondents, often in close conjunction with outcomes assessment and institutional accreditation, mentioned by 25 percent and 23 percent of the applications, respectively. Distance learning figured as a significant campus-wide issue in 23 percent of the 2004 applications.
19. Three 2002 essays provide a good introduction to this topic: Gary B. Thompson, "Information Literacy Accreditation Mandates: What They Mean for Faculty and Librarians," Library Trends 51, 2 (Fall 2002): 218-41;
20. Bonnie Gratch-Lindauer, "Comparing the Regional Accreditation Standards: Outcomes Assessment and Other Trends," Journal of Academic Librarianship 28,1/2 (January/March 2002): 14-25;
21. and Oswald M. T. Ratteray, "Information Literacy in Self-Study and Accreditation," Journal of Academic Librarianship 28, 6 (November 2002): 368-75. Ratteray was writing as assistant director for Constituent Services and Special Programs of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
22. Ilene F. Rockman provides information about the concern for information literacy among some professional-society accrediting bodies in her "Introduction: The Importance of Information Literacy," in Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum: Practical Models for Transformation, ed. Ilene F. Rockman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 11-12.
23. For an account of the emerging teaching functions of librarians, see Evan Farber, "College Libraries and the Teaching/Learning Process: A 25-Year Reflection," Journal of Academic Librarianship 25, 3 (May 1999): 171-7. There is a substantial professional literature about the integration of information literacy and the curriculum.
24. See, for instance, Austin Booth and Carole Ann Fabian, "Collaborating to Advance Curriculum-Based Information Literacy Initiatives," Journal of Library Administration 36,1/2 (2002): 123-42;
25. the collection of essays edited by Ilene F. Rockman, Integrating Information Literacy;
26. and Rockman, "Strengthening Connections Between Information Literacy, General Education, and Assessment Efforts," Library Trends 51, 2 (Fall 2002): 185-98.
27. Edward K. Owusu-Ansah provides a good review of the literature on this subject in an essay that argues in favor of for-credit courses in information literacy, "Information Literacy and Higher Education: Placing the Academic Library in the Center of a Comprehensive Solution," Journal of Academic Librarianship 30, 1 (January 2004): 2-16. In a conceptually rich essay, James K. Elmborg traces the many parallels between the movements fostering writing across the curriculum and information literacy and argues that proponents of the latter have much to learn from proponents of the former.
28. James K. Elmborg, "Information literacy and Writing across the Curriculum: Sharing the Vision," Reference Services Review 31, 1 (2003): 68-80.
29. For more information about these related academic support programs, especially as they find a home in information commons, see Scott Bennett, "Designing for Uncertainty: Three Approaches," forthcoming in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship.
30. One might speculate that the dramatically lower percentage of collaboration among faculty, librarians, and computing staff reported a year after the workshops might, in part, be a result of the way the workshops sensitized participants to this issue and set a high standard for collaborative achievement. There is nothing in the available data to support this speculation about what is certainly the most disquieting shift in the ACRL "test" results from before the workshops to a year later.
31. See Scott Bennett, "The Choice for Learning," Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, 1 (January 2006): 3-13.
32. Some of the consistently most successful sessions of the CIC / NITLE workshops were those offered by chief academic officers, who spoke on (among other topics) their leadership roles in fostering stronger collaboration among faculty members and librarians.