Instruction Librarians: Acquiring the Proficiencies Critical to their Work

Abstract

A bibliographic instruction librarian must possess many proficiencies.In an initial survey of members of the Bibliographic Instruction Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, respondents evaluated the importance of eighty-four bibliographic instruction skills in thirteen categories.Skills in communication, instruction, and planning accounted for fourteen of the top twenty-five skills.In a second survey, respondents indicated how they had acquired the most important proficiencies and where they would have liked to have acquired them.For thirteen of the twenty-five skills, respondents preferred library school to other alternatives.For the other twelve skills, on-thejob training and other formal education were preferred.• ver the years, librarians have provided a variety of different types of library instruction.This study is based on the hypothesis that, although most literature suggests that some form of library instruction is necessary, most librarians don't have the skills needed to provide this instruction effectively.More and more positions in academic libraries require experience in, or the ability to provide, bibliographic instruction (BI).This article examines what skills BI librarians thought they needed to provide BI and to manage BI programs.It then examines what skills BI librarians thought they had, how they had acquired them, and how they thought they could best have acquired them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.