AARL

Separate but equal: librarians, academics and information literacy

Curt Asher

Abstract: Efforts to fit librarians into subject disciplines as teachers have been a destructive trend in library science. Lifelong learning was the aim of bibliographic instruction long before the term 'information literacy' was coined. Librarians and academics provide separate, interdependent instruction, both of which have intrinsic value. Merging the two professions weakens both.

In a June 2002 article in Australian Academic & Research Libraries, Lupton[1] argues that successful information literacy programs require a dramatic shift in librarian self-image. Librarians must, she argues, view themselves as teachers first and librarians second. This essay argues that any trend that moves librarians away from libraries and into academic classroom settings is accomplished at the expense of students and ultimately weakens, rather than strengthens, the role librarians can play at a university.

One of the most destructive trends in library science in the past decade has been the floundering effort to fit librarians into subject disciplines as teachers. Information retrieval skills cross disciplinary bounds, and a researcher who has mastered these skills can become capable of locating information in nearly any subject area. While libraria ns are trained in information retrieval as part of their graduate education, the idea that this knowledge qualifies them to intrude into classrooms and share teaching duties in literature or biology or mathematics or any other subject discipline is simply illogical.

If, as Lupton argues, 'neat operational boundaries [can no longer] be delineated as in the case of library skills or information skills,' then the role of librarians has not just shifted, it's been dissolved. The librarian's value is in separateness from the professoriate. He or she has a sum of skills that allow access to and acquisition of information. The academics' skills are different. While they may have highly polished information retrieval skills, their value to an educational institution has far more to do with their ability to analyse and apply information in a subject discipline. There are distinct operational boundaries that separate these two professions and it is their independence and interdependence, not their merging, which best serves students.

The term information literacy has replaced the term bibliographic instruction in library circles because the 'biblio' element of library science is steadily being displaced by digitised images. But the concept is the same. Lupton argues that 'an understanding and set of abilities enabling individuals to recognise when information is needed and have the capacity to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information' is a definition that does not clearly delineate the difference between information literacy and bibliographic instruction. The reason is that there really is no difference, other than format and semantics.

If students were well-schooled in bibliographic instruction and had learned to wend their way through the maze of paper indexes and vertical files and card catalogues held by past academic libraries, they would have found themselves capable of lifelong learning. If they learned to utilise the content of the print materials by means of either self-guided or formal education, they could certainly have gained knowledge and wisdom. If the aim of information literacy is a 'holistic educational outcome, involving all formats, includes evaluation, analysis and synthesis, is learner centred and involves the learner in all aspects of their lives,' as Lupton argues, how does it differ from the aim of bibliographic instruction? It doesn't. The highly information literate student and the student well-schooled in bibliographic instruction are walking the same road. The only difference is that one sits in front of a computer screen and the other lugged heavy books to the index table.

An academic librarian's job in 2002, like the librarian's job in 1902, is to ensure that learners have access to useful sources of information. Providing access has always involved teaching learners how to seek and find information. It is certainly true that the extensive multiple-source electronic access today requires learners to develop a discerning and critical eye toward sources and a set of access skills to locate them. Is this new? Was there ever a time when an educated person did not need to know how to locate information and discern its value?

Lupton argues that when librarians focus their instruction on information-seeking skills, they encourage superficial learning. Instead, she writes, librarians need to work in tandem with academics to embed information literacy into course content and programs of study and view students' work to ascertain whether information literacy goals are being reached. 'The teacher-librarian has no sense of boundaries of responsibility as is prevalent in the culture of higher education,' she writes.

Academia, however, has boundaries of responsibility for logical and specific reasons. Few academics can catalogue a book and few librarians can lecture on multidimensional matrices. Librarians have no more business inspecting students' classroom assignments than academics have cataloguing masters' theses.

Holistic integration of information literacy into academic programs should be the goal of all universities, but attempting to convert librarians into academics where they share equally in instruction is not a means of accomplishing this goal. Instead, the librarian's areas of knowledge and expertise should be clearly delineated from the academic, so that each can best provide students with the benefits of their expertise.

How is this accomplished?

Librarians need to recognise that information literacy is not a subject discipline and that they do not control it. Instead, they need to recognise the limits of their expertise and communicate to students the knowledge they have acquired as librarians. Librarians know how to use tools to find information. They know where information is kept. They know that the vast majority of accumulated knowledge for the past 500 years is kept between the covers of books. They know how to construct a search, when precision is called for and when it is better to search more generally. They know how to distinguish between sources of information, how to evaluate the potential value of sources and their credibility. They understand that information is dynamic, ever-changing, and valuable only so long as it is accessible. A librarian's only real job, after all, is to make information accessible, whether cataloguing books, working at a reference desk, selecting resources for purchase or subscription, managing databases, building websites, or teaching courses. This area of expertise is in organising, evaluating, and locating resources, and, therefore, they can teach students how information is organised and how to locate it.

What a librarian can't do, at least not as well as the academic who spent a decade of focused reading and study in graduate school and wrote a book-length dissertation on an arcane element of his subject discipline, is teach students to extract information from resources, theorise, or locate meaning. Teaching students to analyse data, evaluate ideas, and develop a philosophical understanding framed within a subject discipline are elements of information literacy that lie outside the expertise of most librarians. Universities hire academics to do that. The librarian can change a life for the better every day by opening a door for a student to a new piece of knowledge. The academic can help the student interpret it. Both of these jobs are important. Both professions teach. But they work best separately. Erasing the boundaries that keep them separate weakens their strengths.

Library science is a practical discipline. As teachers, we can offer practical skills. Skills learning may not utilise the depth of intellectual prowess that, say, analysing Schopenhauer's concept of aesthetics might, but in order to develop an argument, a student needs to know how to find information that will help in drawing conclusions. You cannot develop the higher-order thinking capabilities needed to write a paper on Schopenhauer unless you can master the set of information retrieval skills you need to find the information. Call the information retrieval skills what you like - bibliographic instruction, information literacy, information competency - but they are what librarians have to offer.

Is what we have to offer superficial? It is no less superficial than learning to write a paragraph or factor a polynominal. All are practical skills that, once mastered, allow learners to apply them in new ways to new needs. If students can learn the basic skills a librarian can teach them, superficial or not, they will find themselves swimming forever in a river of ideas, and that is what lifelong learning is all about.

Note

1. M Lupton 'The Getting of Wisdom: Reflections of a Teaching Librarian' Australian Academic & Research Libraries vol 33 no 2 2002 pp75-85

Curt Asher, co-ordinator of Interlibrary Loan and Special Collections, The Walter Stiern Library, California State University, Bakersfield 661-64-3251, USA. casher@csub.edu.nospam (please remove the '.nospam' from the address).