InfoLitEd

Yes

An actual post is forthcoming. It’s been a little crazy here.

If I’ve spoken to you at conferences, meetings or just passing in the hall, you already know this…

As traditional print libraries become more focused on electronic resources and services, many librarians feel pushed to adopt too many of the latest technologies just to keep up with times. I take a practical approach in my philosophy of technology implementation: if a particular technology does not work for you and your clients, do not do it. I espouse this philosophy in all of my talks and presentations about blogs, wikis, games etc. Time is our most valuable resource, and if we attempt to adopt every new information technology we run the risk of sinking too much time into resources and services that may not best serve our clients. Before undertaking any new project, closely examine the costs and benefits to determine its potential.

ACRL Performance Indicators Mapped to Bloom\’s Taxonomy

This is something I’ve been working on a little at a time. After some literature searching, it doesn’t look like anyone’s completely mapped all of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education onto a Bloom’s Taxonomy matrix including factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive skills. This is a draft of most the performance indicators that I will eventually build upon to include each learning outcome. It is under a Creative Commons License. Please send me comments, corrections, etc!

ACRL Performance Indicators Mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy by Dan Hood http://ilit.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/standards-mapped.pdf is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

I know, I know…I haven’t blogged in about a gazillion, persqillion millenia. But I’ve been stupid busy and haven’t been stricken by the necessity to put finger to keyboard by anything until now.

I just got back from presenting at the Pennsylvania School Librarians’ Association Annual Conference in Hershey, Pa, and I must reinforce that school librarians and academic librarians should be working much more closely than we are currently.

Last year I helped the Pittsburgh Public School District develop its first information literacy “curriculum” in almost 25 years, and our presentation was essentially a tutorial on how to write a K-12 inflolit scope and sequence document. My role in the presentation was, “What the can an academic librarian do to help school librarians?” The crux of this is: we need to work together to create a continuum of IL instruction from kindergarten to graduate school as these are, indeed, life long learning skills. Here are our slides.

Mashup: “A mixture of content or elements. “

This tutorial was created with CamStudio, a really simple, free screencapture/movie maker and published with SplashCast. May I say that SplashCast is awesome?

A colleague and I were talking this morning about how quickly search processes change. There are fewer hard and fast rules for finding information anymore.

Example: A student comes to the reference desk with an article citation and wants the full text. First the librarian checks the catalog for a paper or electronic holdings for the journal’s title. That yields nothing. Next, we check the electronic journals list that isn’t completely integrated into the catalog. Again nothing. Ok, so next let’s check the university down the street for a subscription. No dice. So, finally we suggest using interlibrary loan as the student groans over the possibility of a 2 week wait.

As a last resort the librarian simply Googles the title of the article as a phrase and guess what?! The author has self archived it and posted it to her website as a .pdf file.

The point of this story (which I’m sure anyone in reference services has experienced) is that the traditional processes of tracking down full text don’t always work anymore. So how are we to teach students the “how” of searching and retrieving?!

The answer is to stop providing generic information literacy instruction and instead move to a discipline-specific set of critical thinking skills. Searching and retrieving skills vary from in academic disciplines so instead of trying to teach an often convoluted set of searching skills, lets try teaching students how to do it in their disciplines. Is self archiving a common practice among researchers in their field or is there a core group of 5 journals where 80% of the research is published?

Has anyone else seen this Sparknotes or am I totally behind the times? The temptation to copy/paste/alter must be overwhelming for some students. A 2005 Chronicle article mentions use of Sparknotes cribs on ipods. Wow, I remember checking out Cliffs Notes from the library (somewhat shamefully), but a website makes it guilt free.

…WPWVC/ACRL members!

I attended the recent LOEX conference in San Diego about a month ago, and I’m just now getting around to blogging about it. There were quite a few sessions discussing libraries using “civic engagement” as a means of improving the information literacy skills of their patrons. In a nutshell -> get people interested in becoming active members of a community by showing them that their direct input will be taken into account by policy makers and you create a seed for lifelong information literacy skills.

At Carnegie Mellon we’re doing this with deliberative polling. I’ve been involved with this for one poll, but until the LOEX conference I hadn’t made the mental connections necessary to become convinced of its usefulness to libraries.

If you’ve read my other posts or spoken to me about information literacy I hope my marketing ideas came across clearly. In short: in addition to working at traditional informaiton literacy education and integrating information literacy standards into curicula, libraries are in a unique position to market themselves to faculty, administrators, teachers, policy makers, council members, and patrons etc. as the ‘human’ resource in making the world a less ignorant place. Libraries know how to research an issue and excel at teaching people those skills. Promoting civic engagement, whether through researching documents for deliberative polling or providing hosting space for town hall meetings is a promising means of promoting libraries and fostering information literacy in patron constituencies.

I attended a demo of the new SirsiDynix Eps/Rooms OPAC + Website product this morning and one of the questions raised by a librarian colleague of mine got me thinking about the role of information literacy in libraries.

The Sirsi trainer was explaining the ability to attach qualifiers to users’ searches on the back end within a subject-specific room. Essentially, when a user performs a search of the catalog within the “Arts” room, the qualifier “AND Arts” or “AND (Art OR Arts)” can be added for contextual search results. Some of the librarians raised concerns about whether this was “leading” the user without informing him of the qualifiers on his search.

This got me thinking about whether the user cares of his search is changed on the backend. Do most of our users think more deeply about their searches than one or two words? No! Usability research continues to confirm that given a box in which to type a search, users very often use the “Google” approach. Are we going to change this with traditional library-centric information literacy programs? Will users *(especially undergraduates) begin forming complex searches using Boolean logic in our OPACs given the current information literacy programming? Unlikely. That is an enormous task, and with staffing, funding, and curricular integration issues it’s improbable. We need to begin a new approach to fostering life-long information literacy skills by targeting affective library/research skills.

The people developing the ACRL standards should closely follow the creation of the new AASL information literacy standards. These new standards address students’ feelings toward libraries and research and how those feelings may affect their information seeking behavior.

I see an opportunity here to raise library awareness and promote use of the skilled information professionals at the library. Maybe we should stop focusing so much effort on creating proficient searchers and start focusing on making users comfortable asking for help. It may help save our profession from the endangered list.