Thinking
Strategically About Information Literacy
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Thinking Strategically about Information Literacyby Susan Perry Columbia, MD Thinking strategically about information literacy It is a delight to see so many people here who are interested in information fluency however one defines it or describes it, and in exploring the role of libraries in liberal arts college programs. Good thinking on the part of the participants—excellent ideas from you. I think you have covered many of the strategic issues just in your applications to the workshop. My role is to be an integrator, a synthesizer, and I hope a provocateur. Role of a liberal arts education ??????? We all have our own definitions of what it means to be liberally educated. Mine goes something like this: A liberal education helps us begin to know what we know, to be receptive to what we don’t know and to make connections between the two. To pose interesting questions, exercise curiosity, reserve judgment, gather opinion, answer questions intelligently and write and speak articulately seem to me to be the abilities we would like to see in ourselves and the qualities we would like to help the students in our liberal arts institutions achieve. Library staff can play an active role in liberal arts colleges in helping students to become liberally educated. The current situation: Environmental scan of a sort Others gave good overviews of the development of information literacy programs, on the role of libraries on our campuses. I think my role is to help you think ways of assuring that the library is a strong player in the academic enterprise and in helping students to learn. In the mid 90’s several things happened. 1.) Faculty began to incorporate technology into their teaching, and academic computing units began to develop in institutions. 2.) The web turned information retrieval on its ear and faculty began to notice a deterioration in the kinds of resources students chose to support their papers, plagiarism soared. 3. ) Distance education came into existence in some of our institutions and many more adult students began to enroll in college. (As an aside, While the desire to help undergraduates find the information they need is well developed and continues to shift and change as needs and formats change in liberal arts colleges, information literacy, with a few exceptions, has been largely ignored by faculty and academic administrators in research universities. However, US Berkeley is now interested in this issue because systematic assessment over a seven year period has shown that graduating seniors on the campus have not mastered basic research skills.) Recent use studies and what they tell us: Outsell A recent Outsell study looked at the way faculty , graduate students and undergraduates found information. The study revealed to following: It is clear that users want to find the information they need by using their office or home computers. They have high confidence in the library’s collections, but they are slow to use library based reference intermediaries. They prefer to find their own sources by going first to the internet. Contrary to what most librarians believe, users report that they validate the sources identified through the internet. (There is some disagreement with this finding because students assessment of thier own information seeking and evaluation skills may be flawed. Surely faculty are not happy with their resulting research papers ) Both faculty and students readily consult the print resources and they expect to find those materials in their libraries after they have discovered resources on the Internet. Expectations to have ready access to both print and electronic resources create pressure on college budgets, and it is evident that institution wide decisions must be made in the future about access to resources if finances are to be controlled. The Outsell study raises a number of organizational questions for the library as well. How important is traditional reference service? How does the library design its Web site so that users are more aware of its services? What is the library’s role in amassing digital resources developed by faculty? To what extent are library resources linked to course management systems on campus?
Tight integration of the library’s electronic resources with faculty,
administrative and other campus websites Relentless promotion, instruction and customer service. So, while libraries are still valued and actually well populated on many of our campuses, faculty and students are going more and more to the web and bypassing the physical library as a first source for information. We can either throw up our hands in despair or we can get serious about going where the students are. The students are in the classrooms—which means we need to work more closely with faculty The students are working online in their residence halls or homes—which means we need to be building effective web pages which will instruct students we do not see in classrooms and working with student interns who can be our advocates. Building a comprehensive program for information literacy—an institututional issue, not just a library issue Plan alignment Working with senior staff on strategic planning so that there is coherence between where the institution wants to go and the abilities of the information and technology support units to help them get there. Strategic plans—do the plans for the institution incorporate plans for information literacy? Is IL on the radar screen for curriculum committees? Is a librarian a member of the curriculum committee? Do the library’s strategic plans cohere with the institution’s strategic plan? Working differently with other campus constituencies: or what one colleague has called relentless relationship building People alignment Technopedagogy as a model. The relationships between faculty, students, librarians and instructional technologists being build from the curriculum out. Teams with the faculty who would like to revise her course to include more research and technology components, a student chosen by the faculty member—rising junior, a librarian and an instructional technologist. Looked together at roles and at how they might better work together to redesign a course, saw good examples of good teaching with technology from faculty and heard how the models had been developed with special attention to the roles of the constituents, anthropologist, followed up after the course had been presented. Similar to tlt roundtables and other models. Seems to be working well. CLOSE WORKING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LIBRARIANS AND INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGISTS Questions: Are the librarians and the academic computing staff working together on these issues? Several years ago at Mount Holyoke, the then head of CIS and I invited the reference librarians and the instructional technologists to come for drinks at the end of the work day. We wanted to find out which faculty each group was working with. What we found is that they were working most closely with the same faculty and that they were often giving them disparate advice. We began to work to get the groups closer together. In our case, we recommended to the provost that we reorganize the two organizations into one organization. Still, work needed to be done to assure that the two groups worked together. Now the two groups are merging into one group. So step one is to build bridges between the instructional technology support and library information support groups. On some campuses, we will need leadership from the chief academic officers to assure that this happens. WORKING DIFFERENTLY WITH THE FACULTY Step two is to begin to work differently with the faculty. The faculty lead curriculum development. Since the best way to reach students is through the curriculum, we need to start working more closely with them. Step three is the think about what will really help. I believe that any IL plan must be imbedded in the curriculum, must reinforce other things that the students are learning and that the learning is iterative—one shot of how to use the library will not do it. Students must encounter IL in lots of courses at the general education level, at the declaration of a major level and at the capstone project level. And we should begin to think about collaboration really means. It does not mean one shot invitations to offer general, broad workshops for courses. It means faculty, librarians, and Instructional technologists working together to imbed what is needed to do specific assignments into specific courses. WORKING DIFFERENTLY WITH THE STUDENTS Students, too, need to be involved in developing curriculum. They were an enormous help in the technopedagogy workshops and in the projects. (They worked with the faculty, librarian and IT person all year on course development and support. They told us what worked well for them and what did not. They told us in the nicest possible ways when we looked silly trying to use technology in our teaching. We should also think carefully about how students might help and learn at the same time. Here again, I am biased. I have always believed that the work study program for an institution should be more than a way for institutions to get the jobs nobody wants to do done with cheap labor. I believe that work-study jobs should be meaningful and should help students gain the skills they will need for further study and careers. What better way to put that marvelous energy and inquisitiveness to work than in the information and technology arenas of the institution. By this, I do not mean using the students as “digital slaves” a term they coined for themselves at the technopedagogy workshops, but as partners who know what the technology will do and who can work as consultants to faculty and other students on both information and technology projects. And as interns in our library and technology public service units. If we looked at work study as a way to learn really useful skills, we could use it as a feature of a liberal arts education at our institutions rather than just a way to earn a pittance. Curriculum alignment with student expectations and needs Joy Hughes at George Mason University—backed into a good model of information and technology across the curriculum. Was at the Governor’s office and supposed with his technology advisor that every student graduated from the University with the information and technology skills they really needed to begin work or graduate school immediately. They gave her over a million dollars and then she had to go back to the campus and sell the idea. Wasn’t working too well until she and the dean of arts and sciences approached it with the following question: What does a young historian, sociologist, biologist, economist, etc. need to know in the 21st century to be an effective practitioner or scholar in that discipline? That resulted in a Technology Across the Curriculum project which is well recognized and respected and which includes a large information component. For some of the emerging technologies, it is really important for librarians, faculty, instructional technologists to work together. Use and manipulation of large data sets for analysis: librarian knows were to find the information, instructional technologist knows the tools such as spss and can teach students to use them, driven by faculty who can help students ask the right questions of the data. GIS, again, a variety of information, a very complicated toolset and many wonderful learning applications. Multi media. In technopedagy workshops Technopedagogy students also told us that they thought the librarians were invaluable to them and that they thought they were undervalued as team members in the educational process. They said they weren’t really sure what the IT people did. (The IT people agreed. They are still learning their roles in teaching and learning, at least at this group of liberal arts institutions.) Tools alignment with new teaching methods INFRASTRUCTURE Does the institution have in place a means of delivering electronic information to offices, classrooms, residence halls, homes? Is access to hardware, software and network bandwidth sufficient to support the teaching/learning needs of students and faculty? Is an upgrade, replacement plan in place? Are the upgrading spaces and tools a ongoing part of institutional plans? Content management alignment ELECTRONIC CONTENT MANAGEMENT ISSUES Are the librarians and or IT staff beginning to think about digital content management and to think about what parts of print on paper content management need to be changed or dropped? Does content management and organization include an opportunity to help develop the campus’ web site? Are librarians involved in the selection and implementation of course web pages? Were they involved in the selection of the Courseware management system platform if you have one? Are faculty, librarians and it staff thinking about how to cache parts of course web sites or other work that faculty would like saved, how to store, organize, identify and retrieve? Electronic reserves. Rethink this issue. With the rise on cmses on campuses, do we need to do this in two places? Web pages that really work for students both library and IT web pages and course specific pages that include content and library/instructional technology services directly in cases. PRINT CONTENT MANAGEMENT ISSUES Are we continuing to purchase print materials which are not used? Are we continuing to bind journals which we know are and will remain available in electronic format? Are we beginning to rethink our cataloging and organization patterns in anticipation of an increasing digital environment? Budget alignment THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE CAN STOP DOING IN ORDER TO DO SOMETHING M0RE IMPORTANT In most institutions, we do not have the money to add real information fluency to the curriculum and to the Library/it programs unless we stop doing something else. That’s the hard part, what do you stop doing so that you can do something that is probably more valuable for your students/faculty? I believe this is a campus-wide issue, not just a library issue. In many of our institutions, our administrative processes are old and have become crusty and convoluted over time. Those of you who have been involved in the implementation of administrative systems know that much of the cost of putting new administrative systems into place is trying to adjust the program to the way people have always worked. We need to do much more work flow redesign with an eye to streamlining processes institution- wide. Students need to be involved in the process. This is not something that librarians can just watch go past them. We have many processes we could rework. At Mount Holyoke, we called it building a campus culture of work redesign. I have to admit that we could have done more with it than we have, but at least in the Library/IT organization we did do some good thinking and implementation. Much more could be done. Work restructuring in tech services at Mount Holyoke—changed the way we did purchasing, processing and copy cataloging of monographs. Left us with three positions we could use elsewhere. One we gave up in budget cuts, two we moved to public services. Work restructuring at the University of Puget Sound: the librarians at the University of Puget Sound, after a close analysis of services really offered at their reference desk, have done away with their reference desk entirely so that librarians can spend time working with faculty on course integrated instruction and with individual students on major research projects. For many of us, the next step is rethinking technical services work and freeing up some staff so that they can pay more attention to digital asset management. THINKING ABOUT INTERINSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION It has often been said that librarians are genetically disposed to collaborate, but are we really doing all we can in this arena? Interinstitutional collaboration (OCLC has saved our institutions billions of dollars in cataloging costs.) What else might we do? cataloging, processing, collection development, resource sharing, looking at new ways of providing reference such as training a good cadre of students to provide most of the ready reference assistance, build such services as instant messaging reference and information technology help for students. The Five Colleges in Massachusetts share a library system and pay one of the members to provide support for the whole group. We have no systems staff in some of the other libraries to no ill effect. Institutions could also think about sharing courses using the model developed for the Associated Colleges of the South virtual classics department. Perhaps we could share some basic information literacy workshops and I really believe we could borrow from each other’s bibiolgraphic web page development. We don’t have to build new for very class. THINKING ABOUT OUTSOURCING Outsourcing of some services such web maintenance, technology infrastructure has been cost effective and has served many of our campuses well. Several CIC institutions have had good results outsourcing some of your IT services. Immaculata College in Philadelphia and National-Louis University—two very different CIC colleges are outsourcing parts of their technology work to Collegis/Eduprise. This idea is not popular with IT directors, but sometimes it makes good sense. Faculty and staff rewards and alignment THINKING ABOUT CHANGES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION Thinking ahead about changes in scholarly communication. This is not just an electronic vs print materials issue, it is a faculty and staff rewards issue. For example, as faculty begin to publish new and different kinds of research in electronic formats, are faculty tenure and review committees equipped to evaluate that work? How will collection development change as the media used to report research findings changes from print on paper to multimedia? How will the reward structures change for librarians and information technologists in the new curricular partnership environment? We can’t expect to attract and retain good curriculum support staff if the gaps between their salaries and faculty salaries continue to be as great as they are now on some of our campuses, but we must also assure that those staff are really adding vaule in teaching and learning. Will they need staff development opportunities? Are we attracting people with the right skill sets to our library and IT organizations? Space alignment THINKING DIFFERENTLY ABOUT LEARNING SPACES, WHICH LEADS US TO GE0FFREY FREEMAN’S PART OF THE PROGRAM.
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