Executive Summary ("the main points your TF wants to get out to the general ACS population")

 Fluency is a process, not an accomplishment. The media in which ALL (faculty and staff as well as students) must become fluent continue to proliferate, so all must continue to be learners. Collaboration lies at the heart of teaching the requisite skills and supporting the efforts of users to find what they need. We seek to build active learning communities on our several campuses by combining skills and knowledge, but collaborations often cross the structural boundaries of budgetary units, and may be starved for resources. Collaboration between ACS campuses faces the difficulty that we know so little about each other; reciprocal visits would be an effective means to develop the basis for inter-institutional collaborations.

(Bob Johnson's summary is probably what you really want here. I've sent him a message)

 We need to improve our understanding of each other's problems and resources --not just the narrative basics of databases and network environments and faculty and student attitudes, but a deeper comprehension that can only come from face-to-face experience. If inter-campus collaborations are to develop and grow into something sustainable, they must be supported by opportunities to visit other campuses for long enough to develop a sense for the realities. Longer issue-focused workshops would also be fruitful sources of exchange and understanding.

To say that Information Fluency is a moving target is understatement in the extreme --the target moves faster and morphs continually as new media and software possibilities join the mix. The 'solutions' of a given year or set of information resources are likely to be outmoded a year or two later; the security of unchanging "bibliographic instruction" (MLA or APA format, Library of Congress Subject Headings, controlled vocabulary, etc) is pretty irrelevant to most disfluency situations --or, rather, those skills aren't particularly applicable to the contemporary realities of the information people _actually_ need to learn to deal with.

In the specific case of Information Fluency for the sciences, which is what I am especially concerned with: new tools like Web of Science and SciFinder Scholar (which W&L has recently acquired) change the whole landscape of what students and faculty need to know, and what they _can_ know, and what they can get to --and what I need to promulgate and support. These specific tools make it clear that we're moving decisively into a global digital library environment, since they include links between search engines and online full text. But I suspect (on the basis of a few conversations at Southwestern) that at most ACS schools there isn't much going on with Information Fluency in the sciences --that students don't make much uise of data and materials outside of textbooks and teaching materials, and that WoS and SFS are a long way away from most ACS institutions because of their cost.

Fluency is operationally defined in terms of the tools one has to work with. Libraries without Chemical Abstracts (and that's most of ACS I think) aren't much concerned with the powers and indispensability of SciFinder Scholar, and so the levels of fluency it's necessary or even desirable to attempt differ from place to place. We've raised the standards in several ways in the last year or so, and so created for ourselves the necessity to put energy into incresing our users' competencies.

This underscores the problem of the information vacuum --what we don't know about each other. What really IS the state of IF in the specific circumstances of each of the ACS campuses? We need an array of basic data, some of which is pretty readily available on web sites, but isn't gathered together anywhere: ?how many faculty and majors in what departments?
?what courses?
?what library resources (books, periodicals, indexes, support staff, online journals, etc.)?
?what liaisons, relations, collaborations connect faculty *to each other, *to staff and same institution, *to active work with other institutions?
?what computing environments (platforms, networks, etc.)?
?what engagement in 'teaching with technology'?
?what wishes for the future, close and far?
(and so on).

 Some of the above would amount to invidious comparison, but we really do need to know more about each other's work and each other's material conditions. Colleagues at other libraries _can_ be resources for aspects of fluency, and existing resources _can_ be shared via informal links, but the LINKS need to be forged first, and reciprocal travel is probably the means to accomplish this. One could ask: HOW is Information Fluency for the sciences being developed at the 15 schools? Freeing up somebody to visit all 15 and gather the basic information that could really support the possibility of collaboration... what would that take? Certainly _I_ don't have the 6 weeks it would take to ride that circuit, but my sense is that nobody from ACS is doing it either. We at W&L really SHOULD exchange with Richmond and Davidson (as our nearest neighbors), but bringing even that about is problematic.

Would an explicit program of partnering help, setting up links of reciprocal visitation and common projects with one or two nearby, similar (or maybe complementary) institutions?

Of course I keep coming back to GIS as a case in point, something most (and probably all) of us need to develop and support, but which is difficult enough on single campuses and 'way beyond difficult as a consortial effort. Much more to say on that score, later...

Information Fluency needs to set its sights beyond the (basically) in-library tasks of using catalogs and indexes, and should address what's going on in the realms of text retrieval <== looking at how people search, and how search algorithms and engines work. We tend to concentrate on the normative ("students should..." and the ideal --but NB that

...with interactive computing, users do not carry out a single search. They iterate through a series of steps, combining searching, browsing, interpretation, and filtering of results. The effectiveness of information discovery depends on the users' objectives and on how well the digital library meets them.
(William Y. Arms Digital Libraries, pg 205)

 'Collaboration' is at an extreme of Information Fluency, far from Standards and orthogonal to Structures. Collaboration is free-wheeling, task-oriented, individual, and --at least in its details-- difficult to replicate in oter settings. Collaborations are established to try things out and get things done --they are the ad hoc cooperative efforts that combine complementary skills and talents. They are their own sort of episodic fluency, and they often cut across boundaries and jurisdictions. Collaborators are subversive, and proud of it. Collaborations are often essential to innovations. Collaborations often make novel use of resources, and therein lies their greatest weakness: most don't have resources of their owon, or (to put it another way) have to seek and find resources to make the transition from experiment to established innovation. Collaborators are information entrepreneurs, and sometimes pirates or other sorts of freebooters.

Is a "model for collaboration" even possible?