Information Literacy

Library Committee Reflections and Recommendations

The Library Committee has been discussing the issue of information literacy for two years. After reading the 1996 report called "Information Literacy and the Oberlin Education," we began gathering information both here on our campus and from other universities. We asked Professor McAhren to include questions about the library, and more specifically about the use of electronic and print resources in the library, on the senior exit survey in the spring of 1997. We then formulated a survey of our own, with Bob McAhren's help, to ask the faculty, among other questions, what they thought of student information literacy. We have studied numerous articles and websites, theoretical and practical, related to this issue on other campuses. [if you would like to peruse some of these websites, Hugh Blackmer has gathered links at the following URL -- http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/competency/ ] Finally, our discussions in committee have always focused on proper and effective goals for our own graduates and within the context of the liberal arts education at Washington and Lee.

The Leyburn Library self-study report of 1998 lists five goals as part of the library's mission statement. The relevant statement for our committee discussions states that the library should provide " formal and informal instruction in research skills to equip students with the tools to ensure their lifelong intellectual process." A later point in the self-study calls on the library to "develop effective methods to teach and support the use of electronic tools," and to "develop a definition of information literacy." It is within this context that we would like to share our collective thoughts with you. During the planning process that began with the Five Year Plan and will conclude with the strategic plan, the question of how we teach our community to process and evaluate effectively information through technology has been prominent. We would like to add our reflections to this ongoing discussion.

Information literacy is already a key goal of the liberal arts education. We want our students to recognize the need for information, to know how to access information, to understand how to evaluate information, to know how to synthesize information, and to be able to communicate information. The library committee has been concerned primarily with the second and third of these aspects of information literacy - accessing and evaluating information.

In order to better gauge faculty sentiment about these issues, we decided to conduct a survey during the 1997-1998 academic year. We wanted to find out what faculty thought of the library in all its functions, including electronic access to research materials, reserving a series of questions at the end that asked the faculty to judge student use of research materials in the library including electronic services provided by the library. The results confirmed our discussions in committee and reflected the variety of opinions among its members. There is a strong perception among the faculty that we need to be doing a better job teaching our students to properly access and evaluate information, particularly in this electronic age. The consensus seems to be that many students develop the skills to access information later in their academic career than we would like and that even after accessing information, particular electronic resources, they are often frequently unable to properly judge the value of what they have found. When asked whether they were satisfied with the quality of student research on assignments, only 26% of faculty members responded that they were "very satisfied" and less than 13% of faculty members thought that students know how to use the library resources "very effectively". Finally, when asked if they thought that more needed to be done to teach students to properly use these resources, 61 of the 97 faculty members who answered the question responded in the affirmative.

Professors here and at other universities report that students have left behind more traditional, 'tried and true', print research materials for the unsifted, multiform world of electronic reference. Rather than improving the quality of student research and writing, some feel that students are relying on electronic materials of dubious value, and that they are often using the internet as a shortcut to dispose of assignments more quickly. The result is papers that show less evidence of analytical and synthetic skills and less imagination. This judgement may seem too harsh for Washington and Lee students because we certainly have many students who continue to do exceptional work. But is this true as we drift down into the vast expanse of 'B'-average students? We feel that even if our best 15 to 20% of students are learning to use information resources very effectively, the vast majority would benefit greatly from increased exposure to and instruction in information literacy. Indeed, we feel that information literacy, though best imparted through the student's major, transcends disciplinary study and should be considered a liberal arts goal.

The library committee has mulled over numerous options, looking at solutions that other universities have adopted and trying to decide what would work best within the context of Washington and Lee. We all felt that, while there are numerous excellent initiatives on campus to help students in certain majors develop information literacy, we should deal with this on the level of a liberal arts education and within the context of general education requirements. None of us felt that a generic computer literacy / research methods course required of freshmen was a particularly good idea. The primary objection to this idea is that students wouldn't respond well to a methods course that wasn't tied to a specific discipline and specific course content. A number of departments have already developed research methods courses for majors that are quite successful.

We have three specific suggestions that we offer in order to focus discussion and debate, but we hope and expect that you will take these ideas and adapt them to the needs of your majors:

1.) Encourage the development of information literacy within introductory courses in order that students begin to understand early in their undergraduate career the importance and the benefits of print and electronic resources.

2.) Promote the development of 1-credit 190 type courses (previously termed "bibliographic resources" courses, but now more properly considered "information resources") in all departments and make them a pre-requisite for declaring a major. Departments may consider doing this in a variety of ways, but many of us on the committee felt that such a course would be most effective when taken in conjunction with another 3-credit course in the major. We also discussed the possibility of "area" specific 190 courses, for example, an information resources course designed for social science majors. Such a solution would allow certain small departments that might not feel the pressing need to develop their own 190 option, to send majors to another related course.

3.) Add a list of courses that include intensive instruction in information literacy to the general education sheet and require one of them for graduation. We believe that it is important that information literacy be distinguished as an integral part of a liberal arts education.

Finally, we are cognizant that such changes place a burden on faculty members to reconsider how they design assignments, courses, and a major. Faculty should be given ample opportunity and support to refine or develop their own techniques to help make all of our graduating seniors more information literate. We believe that such a goal can best be accomplished through individual courses and majors, but that it should be viewed within the context of a contemporary liberal arts education.

John Lambeth, Chairman of the Library Committee

Barbara Brown, University Librarian