The essence of Information Literacy is having the skills to find what you need to know, and involves processes of

1. learning to navigate systems for storing knowledge and
2. developing evaluative strategies to apply to what you find.

Beyond that general formulation (which applies to everybody, and more or less equally to all disciplines), how you view Information Literacy is a matter of who you are:

• If there is an abstract "information literacy", it's what librarians know and practise, and it views knowledge in terms of systems for indexing and classification;

• but scholars conceive information literacy in terms of how their separate disciplines think of their specialized knowledge;

• university computing personnel are more likely to be concerned with service provision and technical competency;

• and students confront information literacy in terms of interfaces, which often present a bewildering array of choices.

Where is liberal education in this landscape of stakeholders? What should we aspire to teach in the way of practical skills, or require in the way of demonstration of competence? It's unrealistic to expect students (or faculty) to adopt the librarian's perspective, but practical for librarians to work at designing sensible general interfaces (online catalogs, web guides), and to teach disciplinary conventions in the context of specific courses (as instructors or guest lecturers). It's reasonable to ask that faculty assume the primary responsibility for obliging students to go beyond the minimum, but this does require that faculty keep themselves up to date with evolving information technologies. And it's necessary to craft effective support services for students and faculty who are flummoxed or baffled by the range of choices and the necessity to evaluate what they find.

Whatever else is true, the range of kinds of information continues to expand, and the user interfaces refuse to sit still. Skills linked to specific products or databases quickly become obsolete, and atrophy quickly if not in regular use. The challenge is to teach how to learn, so that students will be prepared to meet unforeseen challenges.

The Web is a case in point: 5 years ago it existed in a rudimentary form, and only the most adventurous scholars were thinking about its disciplinary implications. There were no search engines, no guideposts, and no .com sites. But in 1998 the Web is essential to the information economy, and is the primary distribution medium for online catalogs, searchable indexes, myriad databases, and hordes of less easily classified documents. This wonder of the age is now sometimes viewed as a problem, because of its very popularity and success as a democratic information medium. Students seem to use Web resources as if they were ipso facto authoritative (and to use them recreationally), professors question the veracity of web documents and bemoan the ephemerality of sites, and librarians agonize over the Augean disorder of it all. The Web evolves too rapidly for the crystallization of any canonical way to "teach" it, adding features and new means to display and deliver content (interactive Java, map servers, 3D graphics...).

I'm coming to believe that the single best thing to teach is how to produce content for the Web; Web authors are more likely to think about what they're doing (and are more likely to evaluate and constructively criticize what they find) than passive consumers.

The next information revolutions may well involve various forms of imagery, including visualizations of numerical data, maps, 3D graphics, video, virtual reality... all of which are forms of information which aren't easily contained within the print-on-paper model of libraries and scholarship with which we grew up. We can choose the starchy position that the "new media" are parvenu and vernacular but not 'scholarly', but that's probably not sustainable except in the most conservative circles, and in disciplines which remain paper-centered. The job market for which colleges and universities are preparing their graduates wants people with "new media" skills (GIS, HTML, Java...), and graduate programs in many disciplines are beginning to find the skills attractive as well.

It is the essence of liberal education to encourage a climate in which people can experiment with ideas, techniques, approaches and media of expression. Libraries, media centers and computing facilities support exploration and skill development by students, staff and faculty, and all are equally concerned with "information literacy". In order to really learn a skill one must practise it, but to teach a skill one must practise it as well.