Crisis in Information Literacy

Abstract

Abstract Colleges and universities are integrating information literacy components into current curricula to better prepare students for the global marketplace. Students attending Robert Morris University are required to successfully complete five communications courses, that include elements of information literacy, as well as communication intensive courses in their major. Students' inability to successfully complete an upper-level research assignment instigated collaboration between a librarian and the professor. As a result, students can more successfully identify, retrieve, and evaluate information when they receive training that involves application exercises. Introduction Despite numerous exposures and application exercises to the fundamentals of information retrieval, analysis, and synthesis, students' were unsuccessful in their attempts to complete information content designed tasks. This article discusses a unified effort initiated to abate a series of problems related to information literacy. Specifically, an assistant professor of learning resources and a public services librarian (librarian) and a professor of communications (professor) joined forces to devise effective strategies to better manage the crisis. Students' inabilities to apply information literacy skills to a specific area of investigation were identified as a crisis. The term crisis is strong, but is used in this discussion because despite the development of reference materials to assist students with their tasks, and 15-credits of on-going application exercises during freshman and sophomore years, their appeared to be a disconnect between content and application. We begin our discussion with background on information literacy and the five-course sequence at Robert Morris University (RMU) designed to cultivate information literacy skills. The librarian offers perspective on how library resources have been utilized (perhaps underutilized) through the instruction of these courses and preparation of faculty. The professor describes an assignment required in a capstone, skills-intensive course in media management that cultivated awareness that some students had not achieved information literacy. The collaborators share their recommendations as to how future crisis can be avoided using early and on-going collaboration between librarians and faculty. Information Literacy The term information literacy has been known to librarians prior to the publication of the American Libraries Association's (ALA) Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report in 1989. The report just made the whole thing official. In it the authors drafted a definition of and goals for information literacy that continues to impact higher education today: To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. Producing such a citizenry will require that schools and colleges appreciate and integrate the concept of information literacy into their learning programs and that they play a leadership role in equipping individuals and institutions to take advantage of the opportunities inherent within the information society (American Library Association's Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, 1989). Librarians are experienced in all manners of information retrieval and were one of the first professions to notice the gap that was forming between humans and machines as information resources became increasingly available in only electronic formats. These new mediums required additional skills to first locate, evaluate, and then understand the information contained within them. Academic librarians in particular became disturbed by this disconnect. They determined that the placement of information literacy instruction within higher education made sense and began working on a common set of criteria to better accomplish this goal. …

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