The Library as an Instrument for Teaching and Learning

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The Library as an Instrument for Teaching and Learning

by Steve Stoan

As far back as the first century, A.D., Quintilian argued that learners should be motivated to develop skills in finding information so they could become self-directed learners. Comenius, in the seventeenth century, conceived of an international university of scholars dedicated to using information and knowledge to find solutions to problems that related to people=s needs. In the eighteenth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that education should create an environment in which students learn to think for themselves rather than have their teachers do their thinking for them, that is, hand down to them inherited orthodoxies. John Dewey picked up on this theme in the early years of the twentieth century, arguing that education should not be the Acramped study of other men's learning.

Rather, he stated: To find out how to make knowledge when it is needed is the true end of the acquisition of information in school, not the information itself.( 1)

Though the conceptual seeds of a learner-centered education have long been planted, the predominant trend in higher education in the U.S. throughout the twentieth century surely ran in the other direction. Though the graduate schools we attended sought to help students become true lifelong learners and independent thinkers by focusing on the creation of knowledge, undergraduate education long focused heavily on the transmission of knowledge. My own college experiences in the early 60s conformed substantially to this model. Professors did research, published, and lectured. Undergraduates sat passively in class, took extensive notes, asked occasional clarificatory questions, and sought to regurgitate to the professors as faithfully as we could the facts and interpretations that they identitied as being important. In other words, our professors sought to "transmit" to us a body of knowledge they believed we should master. For this reason, this approach to undergraduate pedagogy is sometimes called the Transmission Model.

Some teachers did try to communicate to us that there were different schools of thought and interpretations that we should be aware of and be able to describe on exams. If professors asked for term papers, these were typically of the "topical" variety, i.e., a modest literature review that outlined alternative interpretations, then concluded with an affirmation by the student of which interpreation he or she found most convincing. These topical papers lent themselves to a highly structured, sequential, linear approach that is a far cry from the messy, unpredictable, fit-and-start, serendipitous, seemingly random, non-sequential reality of the intellectual processes involved in real research.

One consequence of this memorization approach was that, despite the liberal arts rhetoric that we were seeking to make students lifelong learners, it was questionable exactly how our teaching had developed such a mindset in them. In short, what the real outcomes had been and how we might measure them were questions seldom posed. It was this system, no doubt, that prompted Albert Einstein's famous comment: "Nothing interferes so much with education as schooling."

A significant shift in our approach to undergraduate education began to occur in the 1980s. Those of us who sat up late on Saturday evening to watch Saturday Night Live may remember the skit entitled "The Five Minute University" in which Father Guido Sarducci humorously but effectively spoofed our paradigm of undergraduate education. Whether Father Sarducci's 1980 skit was the seminal transitional event in our approach to undergradate education is debatable, but certainly the scholarly world itself published a variety of studies and recommendations that seemed to respond to his concerns. In 1983, Nation at Risk appeared (2), recommending an extensive reexamination of higher education. Ernest Boyer published several important works, including Higher Learning in the Nation's Service (3) in 1981 and College: the Undergraduate Experience in America (4) in 1987. In 1994 there appeared the important work by Lion Gardiner entitled Redesigning Higher Education: Producing Dramatic Gains in Student Learning (5). Gardiner garnered a body of empirical evidence to demonstrate the general weakness of the lecture method compared to more learner-centered approaches.

The result of these studies has been a new interest in, and commitment to, an alternative pedagogical model for undergraduate education. As might be expected, baccalaureate institutions and other smaller colleges and universities that strongly emphasize teaching have been among the pioneers in seeking to introduce alternative approaches. The terminology used to describe these new pedagogies is varied: the student-centered classroom, active learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, evidence-based learning, case-based learning, or constructivist pedagogies. Other related terms now frequently bandied about are seamless learning, learning colleges, learning communities, learning oganizations, service learning, and self-directed learning. A somewhat generic term coming to be widely used is simply undergraduate research.

Though the details and nuances of these approaches may vary, at the heart of this new paradigm is the conviction that lecturing and memorization of facts should be supplemented by environments that stress active engagement of the student in constructivist learning that focuses on discovering, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying information in answering appropriately framed questions or seeking solutions to identified problems. Students as active learners must be motivated by curiosity to pose questions, formulate hypotheses, gather information that responds to the hypothesis, and offer a reasoned argument of their solutions. The knowledge they construct for themselves will become a more integral part of their intellectual baggage than facts memorized for a test.

In this model, the roles of teacher and student transmogrify. The professor becomes more of a mentor who creates a learning environment by engaging in ongoing interactive communication of a collaborative nature with the students, who in turn enhance each other's learning through planned joint projects and other group work. The professor is facilitating--is helping the students master a process as well as a body of knowledge. Knowledge, after all, is characterized by imprecise boundaries and shifting perspectives as to value. It is also now expanding at exponential rates in the so-called information explosion, rendering even more illusory the idea that we can teach our students much of it. As a simple illustration, a detailed study by Martha Williams found that from 1975 through 1999 the number of online databases increased from 301 to 11,681. The number of records they contain grew from 52 million to 12.86 billion.(6)

In this environment, a crucial skill for professors to develop is that of determining an appropriate level of information mastery in light of the concepts they are seeking to help students master. History professors, for example, could demand so much mastery of names, dates, treaties, events, and so on that they could easily fail every student in the class. They really must ask themselves what interpretational frameworks, what larger issues of historical interpretation, and what basic concepts about historical thinking they are seeking to get across, then determine what body of facts will accomplish those purposes. In the new learning paradigm, facts are seen as the means to an end rather than the end in itself. After all, there are books and journals, reference books, and now a huge World Wide Web filled with factual information. The question for us educators is whether our students leave college with the wisdom, the knowledge, and the skill base to enable them to frame appropriate questions, determine what information might be needed to address the issues, then find, evaluate, and use that information effectively when it is needed.

In this new pedagogy, general education requirements acquire a new justification in that they introduce students not so much to bodies of facts in the major areas of human intellectual endeavor as to modes of enquiry and problem-solving in those areas. (7) The investigatory methods of the physicist are different from those of the historian, which in turn differ from those of the philosopher or the behavioral scientist. The Harvard core introduced two decades ago specifically stated that its purpose was to show what kinds of knowledge and what forms of enquiry exist in these areas, how different means of analysis are acquired, how they are used, and what their value is.(8) Students should emerge from their undergraduate experience not simply with a body of knowledge but as masters of a research method as well. As stated earlier, the term undergraduate research has become one of the watchwords of this new approach to learning.

In drawing a contrast between a traditional Transmission Model and a newer Research Model, I do not want to make the dichotomy too strong. I will be the first to admit that not all professors even in my youth relied exclusively on lectures and memorization. I also strongly believe that lectures and memorization of facts do still have an important place in undergraduate education. However, in structuring a four-year curriculum, we are more and more seeking to stress certain learning experiences across that curriculum and incorporate them where feasible, in specially designated courses or as modules in a range of courses in a range of disciplines. To move us toward the research model, many campuses have undertaken substantial restructuring of their curricula. At the same time, their Centers for Faculty Development have grappled with the sometimes daunting task of nudging tenured professors to take a fresh look at their teaching philosophies, course objectives, and assignments.

At this point, it might be helpful to back up and ask how libraries traditionally fit into the Transmission Model. In many ways, their role was as passive as that of undergraduate students. They acquired and organized scholarly resources for those curricular uses mandated by the faculty. The resources selected had overwhelmingly been through editorial and usually scholarly peer-review processes. They had then been selected by teaching faculty or librarian collection developers because of their quality and match with the curriculum. This two-stage filtering process pretty much guaranteed that any material the library made available to students met certain minimal quality criteria. The selection and cataloging processes made use of standard bibliographic resources that the publishing industry fed into seamlessly. Beyond this, librarians, when asked, provided reference assistance to students in finding material for assignments. In providing this service, they made use of printed reference works and a number of standardized bibliographic tools developed to retrieve book and periodical literature in each scholarly discipline.

Libraries did develop a sense of themselves as teaching institutions in a derivative way, providing what we call bibliographic instruction at the request of faculty members. Typically, these sessions consisted of one-shot presentations in which librarians tried to review for students in a class the principal resources that might be helpful to them in doing a class project in that discipline. If a faculty member were prescient enough to talk to the librarian ahead of time about the assignments being given, so much the better. Such coordination meant that the presentation could then be more precisely targeted to make the students' efforts more efficient. In general, however, bibliographic instruction sessions very much conformed to the lecture-oriented transmission model widely used throughout the university. Given the circumstances, it was difficult for bibliographic instruction not to be a somewhat dry recitation of possibly useful resources and techniques for exploiting them.

This reactive system left much to be desired even in the print-on-paper era. Librarians were completely dependent on faculty members to seek out such instruction. This situation created a hit-or-miss environment where some students in some disciplines profited from instruction while others did not. The instruction itself lacked an organic relationship to the intellectual work the students were doing. Much reference desk work, though we liked to call it one-on-one instruction, was equally detached from the cognitive processes of the student researcher. It largely boiled down to suggesting possibly useful resources and providing assistance with the mechanics of using the tools.

Reference desk work was made more difficult by triangulation. In the absence of direct communication between the instructor and the librarian, the librarian often had to divine from the students= often inarticulate attempts to seek help what the instructor was really looking for. Much could get lost in the process. Librarians found that instructors gave out reading lists containing materials not owned by the library. Librarians found that intructors put students to work on projects that the library had few if any resources to support. Librarians found that instructors cut the students free to come up with their own topics, and the librarian was left trying to cope with frantic students, eyes glazed over, struggling desperately to come up with something to write about. Many requests for bibliographic instruction for classes were patently an afterthought for professors who had to be out of town or could not otherwise meet class. Campus attitudes and power relationships were such that most librarians would not even suggest to instructors that better coordination in assignments could benefit everyone concerned.

Lack of coordination between teaching faculty and librarians became more serious in the 1980s as enduser electronic databases first made their appearance. It quickly became apparent to experienced librarian searchers that most users had little or no understanding of the organization of an electronic bibliographic database into records subdivided into searchable fields which could be combined in a number of complex ways using Boolean operators. The issue of controlled vocabulary and how to exploit it was a mystery to most users, as was the concept of clean or dirty searches, or relevance vs. recall. Electronic search logs invariably showed the elementary level of searching skills, which resulted in ineffective exploitation of the resources made available by the databases. A further complication was that virtually from the first appearance of electronic resources, students showed a strong tendency to rely on them exclusively despite their chronological shallowness and lack of comprehensiveness in indexing the literature. For practical purposes, that portion of the scholarly record whose indexing was electronic, which was initially very tiny, was all that students wanted to use.

These kinds of issues were already percolating in the library world in the 80s, producing some of the earlier library literature suggesting the need for a structured curricular approach to information literacy, a term widely used in library literature at least two decades ago. The 90s, however, saw the emergence of another development that radically broadened our perception of the knowledge base that should be included in the concept of information literacy, heightened our sense of ugency at its implementation, and merged it logically into the expanding research model being touted for undergraduate education. This development, whose ramifications we are still exploring, was the rise of the World Wide Web after 1993.

We are now facing a new generation of college students who have reached their majority using the Web and who unreflectingly turn to it when seeking information. Several recent studies, including one conducted by OCLC, (10) find that more than 90 percent of college students start work on a class project using a Web search engine like Google or Altavista. A number write their entire papers now using only Web resources located through search engines. The educational implications of this new information-seeking behavior are considerable, for a number of reasons. First, the Web contains virtually no refereed scholarly literature that can be accessed through search engines. Such literature is part of what we are now calling the deep Web, the more than 2 million Web sites (as of 2001) that for one reason or another are restricted by password, IP address recognition, or some other limitations. (11) Published literature that has gone through any editorial or peer review process is formally copyrighted, proprietary, and available only for a fee. Further, only modest amounts of such literature have been digitized. Fewer than 10,000 journals of around 60,000 have any digital issues, and little more than 60,000 books of the tens of millions that have been published are available electronically, nearly always at handsome prices. The great bulk of the world's literature, scholarly as well as popular, continues to be print-on-paper, and will be that way for some time into the future. The American publishing industry alone is still churning out around 120 thousand book titles a year. One recent estimate is that only about 15 percent of the world's currently published scholarly literature is available in digital format.(12)

Of the 3 million plus public Web sites accessible to Web search engines in 2001, hardly half are actually indexed by search engines, which are simply incapable of keeping up with the crunch of trying to index such a vast, rapidly growing and unstable body of publications. Moreover, the Web is in no way a library. The material in it has been through no editorial selection process to guarantee authenticity, validity, or reliability. The materials cannot be considered permanent. Their addresses cannot be considered permanent. According to OCLC, of the URLs of public Web sites available in 1998, only 52 percent still existed in 1999, 28 percent in 2000, and 15 percent in 2001.(13)

Of equal significance is that Web publications are not cataloged according to any criteria that professional indexers or catalogers would apply. Rather, the public Web relies on search engines that use computer programs to pull keywords out of the text of Web pages and rank those pages for relevance based on varying algorithms devised by the search engine designers. Savvy Web designers who understand something about the algorithms often pack the metatags of their pages in an effort to guarantee that their pages will get a high relevance rating and show up early in search results. Many search engines deliberately give heavy weights to the pages of Web sites that contribute advertising dollars, another practice that seriously compromises the objectivity of the searches. The most heavily used search engine, Google, ranks according to the number of hits a page receives, an algorithm that penalizes relatively new sites that may be of very high quality.

The keyword indexing is clumsy, inefficient, and generally turns up such a vast number of hits of widely varying quality that the results can often be useless. Then, too, in the absence of any quality filtering the accuracy of the information found may be questionable. I recall once stumbling across a Periodic Table of the Elements that displayed a total of 74 elements. One study, appropriately entitled Web Rage, (14) found that three-fourths of respondents on a survey reported some significant level of frustration seeking targeted information on the Web. 86 percent wanted more efficient searching. The OCLC study reported that half of Web searches undertaken by students they sampled turned up no usable information.(15)

Unfortunately, it is also clear that users do not understand how to use the more advanced searching techniques that Web search engines have created in an effort to make searching somewhat more precise. Effective use of Boolean operators is one such option, but one study found that fewer than 10 percent of Web users, perhaps as low as 3-5 percent, ever use them. (16) Of those who do, fully a quarter do so incorrectly. (17)

Strong reliance on the free Web combined with limited knowledge of the broader world of knowledge generation and publishing has other implications. The technology lends itself to a greatly enhanced version of cut-and-paste that can make for a superficial patchwork of the words or ideas of others whose own authoritativeness may be suspect. When anyone can now publish on the Web, everyone now looks like an expert. The result, as one writer fears, is that students value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own. (18) The generally lower quality of information on the free Web may foster superficial thinking, for students seldom see formally constructed arguments there.

Many students thus patch together papers lifting other people's ideas and words, assuming that anything on the Web may be used without citation as long as they change the words a little bit. In many cases, they don't even change the words. This type of cut-and-paste plagiarism is supplemented by the more serious recourse to hundreds of easily found term paper mills. One prominent site of this kind, SchoolSucks, reports an average of around 10,000 unique visitors a day. (19) Since these sites operate largely by providing access to papers contributed by other students around the country, students can plagiarize all or parts of papers at a vastly expanded level. Some surveys show that at least 80 percent of college students have plagiarized at some level, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes out of design. In so doing, they miss out on the learning experience that the assignment was meant to provide.

It has been pointed out that such student behavior is perfectly rational if we apply a reward/cost ratio model to these practices. People look for the most efficient way, that is, the one that involves the least effort, to achieve a desired reward. If students can spend an evening on Google and Yahoo and put together a paper that earns them a grade they are satisfied with, many will do so. This being so, we must raise the issue of the role of the faculty in shaping the reward/cost ratio that students work with. If faculty assignments withheld good grades from projects that did not make use of a certain range of scholarly materials, carefully selected Web resources, attention to scholarly conventions in writing, quoting, and referencing, and so on, we should anticipate a significant shift in student learning behavior.
This issue of teaching faculty influence on student behaviors shades off into another very significant dimension of the problems we are currently facing. How knowledgeable are many faculty members themselves of the nuances of traditional publishing versus Web publishing, the free Web and the deep Web, citation conventions for electronic resources, combatting plagiarism in the electronic environment, copyright issues in using textual or other materials found on Web sites or in e-mail discussion lists, issues of costs in accessing information, and general ethical issues relating to information use in the new electronic environment? The answer is difficult to quantify, but it would appear that this is an area where faculty development is needed. Some professors are extraordinarily well informed on these matters; others find themselves caught up in an environment changing with such bewildering rapidity that they have not, frankly, been able to sort it all out.

Faculty are aware of problems and are wanting to take steps to improve their course assignments. However, they are not always sure themselves of how to deal with it. Daily at the reference desk, librarians hear students tell us that they are only supposed to use Web resources or that they are not supposed to use any Web resources or that they are not supposed to use journal articles out of aggregator databases or that they may only use PDF versions of scholarly articles rather than HTML versions.

The problem of triangulation continues unabated, since the librarians are often not sure if the students really understand what the professor is asking for. Beyond this, it is obvious to librarians in providing assistance to many faculty members in their research that their searching skills are sometimes wanting. Just within the last two months, two teaching faculty at Drury thanked me for the assistance that one of the library faculty provided them. They remarked that they were amazed at how much more she managed to find than they had found working in the very same databases. Another faculty member was clearly pleased when two of the library faculty showed him how to combine free-texting, assigned vocabulary, and Boolean in mining the ERIC database.

Libraries responded as best they could to the new information environment that emerged with the Web. They rapidly abandoned CD ROM and character-based databases in favor of Web-accessible ones in order to provide distributed access on and off campus. They expanded their role in collection development by setting up directories of selected Web resources in which they identified high quality Web sites, then organized, listed, and annotated them. They began to work through OCLC, a major bibliographic utility, to catalog high quality Web sites in order to make them readily available through the WorldCat database and even through their local online catalogs. They set up material on their own Web sites relating to plagiarism, Web-based assignments, evaluation of Web resources, copyright issues in the digital environment, and the newly emerging scholarly conventions in citing electronic resources.

Libraries designed Web pages as portals to guide users to high quality proprietary and free Web resources. The saw the library Web page itself as an instructional resource for students who were working from their dorm rooms or home, who were taking courses at remote sites run by the college, or who were taking online courses. They integrated Web search engines into their reference routines, spending much time trying to keep up with the principal ones and the constant changes being made in their search interfaces. Many experimented with both asynchronous and real time online reference assistance. They began creating electronic reserves and finding ways of linking these into the emerging world of Web-assisted and online instruction. They began reevaluating how space in the building was being used and, where possible, set up classrooms wired for computer instruction. They offered campus workshops, with varying degrees of success, on any number of these topics.

Librarians have had a unique position on campus as information specialists who serve as neutral brokers in working across the curriculum with all departments, programs, and scholarly disciplines. They have had an excellent knowledge of the world of traditional publishing and the tools that access it. They have logically educated themselves about the world of Web publishing and the tools to access it. Their work in purchasing books, journals, and electronic resources makes them aware of the relative costs of information and of what they often call fee vs. free issues. Their long work with interlibrary loan and reserves has caused them to keep generally current with issues pertaining to copyright and fair use. Their activities in licensing arrangements for electronic resources reinforces their knowledge of legal issues relating to information access. As a group, they have been committed to expanding their understanding of the new electronic information environment to determine how to exploit it in providing appropriate guidance to information seekers. They also have a long tradition of concern for freedom of access to information and opposition to censorship as essential ingredients in intellectual freedom.

At the same time, the academic experiences and credentials of librarians heighten their concerns for helping college students approach the world of information and its uses in a knowledgeable, critical, and intelligent way. Early on, long before the emergence of the Web, they were working at refining the concept of information literacy as a desirable knowledge base. A quick search in the Library Literature database on the bound phrase information literacy turns up around 450 articles, book chapters, and books, and the numbers keep growing. In recent years, more and more of this literature includes concrete suggestions for designing learning exercises that actively engage students rather than using lecture presentations exclusively. At library conferences and workshops, presentations on and discussions of information literacy are ubiquitous. In 2000, the Association of College and Research Libraries published a very comprehensive document titled Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.(20) A substantial number of libraries offer their own complete credit courses in information literacy, often couched in such terms as Research in the Information Age. It could be argued that in no segment of the academy will we find such a coherent approach and consistent attention to the full range of issues that are generally associated with information literacy.

A few words of clarification would be in order here. In surveying the current technology scene on campus and elsewhere, we are keenly aware that a certain minimum level of computer skills is increasingly necessary to function effectively in today's world. However, computer literacy, while valuable, is not the same as information literacy. Computer literacy focuses on understanding how to use computers, install and uninstall software, work Web browsers, manipulate and create files in different formats, organize and name files for efficient retrieval, move files around, and handle the basics of e-mail. It also involves working with software programs like word processing, slide presentation software, spreadsheets, and Web editors that are used for presenting information. Incoming freshmen can be very computer literate. At the same time, they can be, and usually are, very weak in information literacy. On the other hand, a person with modest computer literacy skills can be highly information literate.

The ACRL document that I mentioned above summarizes the information literate individual in the following way. This person can:

• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
• Incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.(20)

Note that the emphasis in information literacy is not on computer skills per se or information-presentation skills but on skills in identifying types of information needed, determining where to find it, retrieving it efficiently, using critical thinking in evaluating it, knowing how to use it ethically and legally, and integrating it into some meaningful pattern that one can explain and defend. Note also that the concept of information now includes not only textual materials in hardcopy or electronic format but also images, audio, and video in a variety of different file formats, both analog and digital. And it involves information that may be gathered in many venues beyond the library.

We have now come some distance in reviewing the Transmission Model and the Research Model, the traditional role of the library in supporting the Transmission Model, the development of the World Wide Web as a significant contributor to the information explosion, the initial reaction of libraries to the new information environment, and the emergence of information literacy as an area of curricular concern. It remains to tie all of these ideas together and explore how the library might redefine its role in the era of the Research Model and information literacy.

Colleges and universities, in fulfilling their liberal arts mission to turn out undergraduate students who truly are lifelong learners, have been moving steadily toward implementing some variant of the Research Model in undergraduate education. Effective implementation of this model in the era of the information explosion and the World Wide Web should logically involve a sizeable dose of information literacy incorporated strategically into the curriculum. Effective research skills demand an intelligent understanding of the complex information environment we now face. Because of their interest, training, and skills, librarians have a great deal to offer the campus in implementing the research/information literacy model. However, the logic of integrating what they can offer into the curriculum demands a very different type of relationship between the librarians and the teaching faculty than has existed in the past. It demands a different view of the role of the library in the academic enterprise. It demands the development of new skills by librarians themselves.

Since information literacy skills can best be introduced into coursework partially by teaching faculty and partially by librarians, and since both subject content and information retrieval skills are part of the equation, teaching faculty and librarians should logically work together in a collaborative relationship to create the learning environments that will enable students to acquire the desired competencies. They should also collaborate in defining those competencies and coming up with ways of assessing outcomes.

We are already changing the teacher/student model to one of collaboration in a mentoring relationship. We are already introducing collaborative efforts among students as an important ingredient in developing learning environments. We are already seeking to break down old disciplinary boundaries through interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary team teaching of a collaborative nature, creating learning communities that recognize that the seamless web of knowledge can best be communicated to students by breaking away from departmentalization. In this environment, the last old campus boundary to break down in the interest of collaboration for creating effective learning environments is that between the classroom and the library.

True collaboration between teaching faculty and librarians would require far more structured interaction than less intensive relationships like networking or coordination. Collaboration involves the creation of an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship to achieve common goals. The parties must plan, jointly determine what they are seeking to achieve, identify strategies for accomplishing it, define and assign tasks, then implement their projects. In effect, they become team members who must work closely with each other and listen carefully to each other.

As a matter of fact, much scientific research is already carried out by teams with an information specialist as part of the team. If student projects were seen in the same lightBas a team effort involving the student, the instructor, and a librarian--the librarian as information specialist would be able to intervene early on in the research process in an integral, structured, proactive way rather than a tangential, superficial, reactive way. Many librarians recognize the advantages of operating in this way. Librarians have begun suggesting that we approach the counseling of students at the reference desk as if we were members of a team seeking to find collaborative solutions to the research problem posed. This approach would create a more intimate, prolonged involvement with the work that the student is doing to replace the traditional, more superficial and detached consultation in which librarians were often reluctant even to probe into the details or nuances of the student's project or evolving ideas.

On a related note, there is growing interest among librarians in using the reference encounter as a teaching moment of the learner-centered variety. Similar to the team concept, this argument holds that reference librarians should serve as mentors in seeking to assist the students in working through their own journey of discovery. To do this, librarians need to learn how to ask appropriate questions aimed at determining where the student is intellectually in the development of his or her ideas and work interactively from that base. To put it another way, the reference process itself needs to move away from a transmission instructional model toward a student-centered learning model. To attempt to foster these kinds of student-librarian relationships, some libraries have instituted what they call "buddy systems" in which they arrange to have all the students in a class introduced to a librarian who serves as their buddy their personal contact--during the semester.

Such attempts to create a closer, more collaborative, more consultative relationship between librarians and students over an extended period while working around the instructor have their limits. They will not be nearly as effective as integrating the librarians into recognized teams sharing responsibility for providing the students with appropriate guidance. The instructor of record provides the subject content, the guidance in framing appropriate questions, and the guidance in generating types of data peculiar to the discipline, such as scientific data generated in the lab or behavioral science data generated through survey instruments. The librarian provides guidance in identifying useful resources in the world of print and Web publishing, mastering techniques for maximizing retrieval of appropriate material from those resources, understanding how to evaluate the relative merits of the material found, and defending oneself against information overload. The instructors and the librarians can share responsibility, depending on their personal inclinations, for dealing with issues such as plagiarism, legal use of text, images, audio, or video, appropriate citation conventions, ethical issues pertaining to use of information, cultural aspects of information use, and so on.

There are other advantages to a collaborative approach. The problem of triangulation in which students works separately with the instructor and the librarianBif they work with the librarian at all--would be eliminated. The librarian would have access to all students in the class at some level, not just those who seek assistance. The librarian should be able to provide better guidance to the students on the full range of resources in all formats that are available inhouse and from remote sources. Students could be steered more directly into projects that exploit those resources that the library does have or can make readily available at modest effort or cost.

The teaching faculty and the librarians could jointly identify lacunae in library holdings in all formats and work to rectify those. Plagiarism and unethical conduct could likely be minimized. There could be much better cooperation in prioritizing allocation of library resources to obtain what is essential for supporting the undergraduate curriculum. This last matter is particularly important given the limited resources of most colleges, the rapid inflation in the cost of materials, and the corresponding need to function as a laboratory library that works to provide an adequate sampling of resources that closely support undergraduate assignments. Indeed, understanding the economics of information generation and access is itself an issue in information literacy.

I have not attempted to offer specific strategies for how information literacy might be introduced into a curriculum. Rather, I have limited my remarks more generally to conceptual and philosophical concerns. The remainder of this workshop should offer a wealth of ideas of how these issues might be approached at a more concrete level. Suffice it to say at the moment that the commoner suggestions include separate required credit courses in information literacy, perhaps taught jointly by teaching faculty and librarians, modules introduced into general education courses, modules introduced into required upper level research courses in each major, and modules integrated into senior research projects. In fact, the details would have to be worked out on each campus by teaching faculty and librarians working together to develop and implement effective programs given the curriculum, traditions, personalities, and peculiar interests and skills of likely participants on that campus.

Bringing about such a sizeable change in the relationship of the library to the rest of the campus is a complicated process that involves significant shifts in attitudes all around. Obviously, college administrators must support it or it will be dead a-borning. The status of librarians might need to change in some places, since some campuses do not grant faculty status or have librarians integrated into campus governance, curriculum development, and so on. Teaching faculty, or at least some of them, must be convinced that a partnership with the library to develop information literacy through the curriculum is a desirable objective.

Librarians must also be brought along, since such changes would involve significant new roles for them and alter their work environment and job expectations considerably. The college administration might have to take a hard look at staffing patterns as librarians assume new responsibilities. Long-standing attitudes and prejudices, of teaching faculty toward librarians and librarians toward teaching faculty, would have to be addressed. Those librarians who have limited or no experience in a classroom would, like newly hired faculty, need support from the faculty development office. They might need assistance, along with teaching faculty they might be working with, in designing learner-centered assignments after deciding what learning objectives they are seeking to achieve. They would need the same assistance as other faculty in defining learning competencies and helping define outcomes assessment.

In short, the new collaborative model would move the library away from the traditional reactive, bibliographic instruction model that fit in with the traditional lecture approach to education. It would require that library instruction be integrated with certain coursework in a more seamless way in which the instructors and librarians would share responsibility for creating the learning environments that would accomplish desired information literacy outcomes. It would redefine the library as an integral part of the instructional efforts of the campus rather than a service organization that does some limited support instruction in a scattershot way depending on the values of the instructors. It would also require substantial rethinking of relationships and roles among administrators, teaching faculty, and library faculty.

NOTES

1 John Dewey, Education as Natural Development, Schools of Tomorrow, in Essays on Education and Politics 1915 [The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Volume 8] (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1976-83), p. 221, as quoted in George Allan, AThe Art of Learning with Difficulty,@ in Future Teaching Roles for Academic Librarians, ed. Alice Harrison Bahr (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), p. 8.

2 A Nation at Risk, the imperative for educational reform: a report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education / by the National Commision on Excellence in Education (Washington, D.C.: The Commission [Supt. of Docs, U.S. GPO Distributor], 1983.

3 Ernest Boyer, Higher Learning in the Nation's Service (Washington, D.C. : Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1981.

4 Ernest Boyer, College, the Undergraduate Experience in America (New York : Harper & Row, 1987).

5 Lion Gardiner, Redesigning Higher Education: Producing Dramatic Gains in Student Learning (Washington, D.C.: George Washington University, 1994).

6 Martha E. Williams, Ahighlights of the Online Database Industry and the Internet 2000, in 21st Annual National Online Meeting: Proceedings 2000 (Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2000), pp. 1-5.

7 James Wilkinson, From Transmission to Research: Librarians at the Heart of the Campus. in Future Teaching Roles for Academic LibrariansI, ed. Alice Harrison Bahr (New York: Haworth Press, 2000), p. 32-33.

8 Ibid.

9 Eva Perkins, Johns Hopkins Tragedy: Could Librarians Have Prevented a Death? Newsbreak and Conference Reports (Information Today, Inc., 2000) <http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010806?1.htm>

10 How Academic Librarians Can Influence Students' Web-Based Information Choices, OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students (June, 2002) <http://www2.oclc.org/oclc/pdf/printondemand/informationhabits.pdf>

11 "Web Characterization," OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., Office of Research <http://wcp.oclc.org/>

12 Laura Sessions Stepp, "Point, Click, Think," Washington Post, July 15, 2002. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9729-2002Jul15.html>

13 "Web Characterization."

14 "Web Rage," Roper Starch Worldwide. <http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/02-searchrage.html>

15 "Web Characterization."

16 Dietmar Wolfram, A Query-Level Examination of End User Searching Behaviour on the Excite Search Engine, Canadian Association for Information Science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference, 2000. <www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/wolfram.htm>

17 Edward Proctor, Boolean and the Naive End-User: Moving to And, Online (July-August, 2002), p.35.

18 Stepp.

19 Joanna Glasner, Where Cheaters Often Prosper, Wired News (Terra Lycos Network) <http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54571,00.html>

20 "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education," American Library Association, Association of College & Research Libraries. <http://www.ala.org/acrl/ilintro.html>

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