Volume 3, Number 2 February/March 1998 Editor's Note Separating the Wheat from the Chaff : How to Tell the Good Sites from the Bad by Kathy Schrock Information Competence - California Style! by Judy Swanson Developing Information Literacy Competencies for a Five-Campus University System by Shaleen Barnes Teaching Web Evaluation: Meeting the Challenge by Jan Alexander & Marsha Ann Tate Internet Toolkit Clipboard Other Issues Current Issue January 1998 What 1998 Will Bring 1997 Issues 1996 Issues		Developing Information Literacy Competencies for a Five-Campus University System Shaleen Barnes The University of Massachusetts (UMass) Information Literacy Project was born out of a desire, among librarians in a multi-campus system, to do four things: work collaboratively on mutual instruction goals build a foundation for university-wide discussion about information literacy develop outcomes based guidelines for information literacy competency for all UMass students promote multi-campus discussion of information literacy and technology issues based on the skills, history, and culture of each campus. When we started, we suspected that the WWW and 100-level "anorexia-gun control-death penalty" courses were a match made in heaven. Before we did anything with the Web, however, we knew we had some homework to do. Given the best of all possible information worlds we asked ourselves: What is it that we want our students to know when they graduate? What mechanical and cognitive skills will help students in their academic career and beyond? We were faced with the task of deciding goals and objectives that would be acceptable to all the campuses while, at the same time, being specific enough so to accomplish our instructional goals. As librarians, we were concerned that information literacy was being confused with, and sometimes even subsumed by, computer literacy. (That would be fine if you could push f6 to learn how to think.) With all this in mind, we set out to define the information literacy competencies that we could expect all our graduates to possess. Two small Professional Development Grants in Instructional Technology for Academic Development from the UMass President's Office affirmed support from the administration and helped us begin the project. The University of Massachusetts consists of five campuses that are distant and dissimilar. To complicate matters, one of the campuses (UMass Worcester) offers nothing but graduate degrees. During our discussions, we discovered other wide differences and difficulties among our campuses. For example, every library's home page was organized differently, every campus had different OPAC software, some of us had more established library instruction programs than others, and all had different levels of systems support. While these differences sometimes bogged down our discussions, in the final analysis they didn't matter. Students still needed to have some basic skills, and we needed to decide what those should be. Our discussions confirmed the belief that, regardless of the intellectual expertise of our students, the lack of "gatekeeping" on the WWW has created a sense of urgency about the need to teach information literacy to all our students. Through a series of four discussion meetings, each addressing a specific aspect of information literacy, a group of librarians from all five campuses, with computing professionals from the "home" school of the Project (UMass Dartmouth) developed a set of information competencies. The topics of the meetings and questions we asked were: Defining Information Literacy What is information literacy? Are there types or degrees of literacy? How does oral or written literacy relate to numeracy or information literacy? How is computer supported literacy different from information literacy? Does information literacy vary by discipline? Establishing Competencies Are there minimum levels of information literacy? Are they achievable in our environment? How does our diverse population have an impact on competency levels and expectations? Can we build on efforts at the K-12 level? What value does information literacy add to a student's education? Are there basic expectations in the workplace that our students should be meeting? Developing Outcome-based Strategies Can literacy be measured? What examples are there in reading and writing which may be useful in information literacy? What are measures of cognitive information literacy competencies? What evaluation tools are useful for determining success? Implementing Ideas How can information literacy be integrated into existing library instruction programs or general education initiatives? How can each UMass campus capitalize on the resources, skills, history, curriculum, and technology that exists? Are there ideas that could be implemented on all the UMass campuses? After a literature search and adoption of the American Library Association's definition of information literacy, we adopted broad goals (based partly on some developed in Colorado) that stated that by the time they graduate all UMass students will be able to: recognize the need for information formulate questions based on information needs identify potential sources of information develop and use successful search strategies evaluate information use information. To each of these broad goals, we attached specific objectives that look very much like traditional library instruction objectives, with the additional inclusion of electronic resources. Following the fourth session, the Project Director prepared, posted on the Web, and distributed a final report. Two important developments which emerged during our discussions were the necessity of including computing staff on each campus in the planning process, and the desirability of extending our discussions to those involved with K-12. Any course or module offered over the WWW will have an impact on computing services on every campus. Also, particularly in public higher education, information literacy efforts at the university level must build on the efforts already under way in K-12. A vast majority of students at UMass come from, and stay, in the Commonwealth. As a result, we established an ongoing dialogue with the past and current presidents of the Massachusetts School Library Media Association. What we discovered was that establishing information literacy competencies crosses traditional disciplines, promotes communication between campuses, and advances an understanding of information technology. While librarians and academic computing personnel have made some commendable efforts at teaching information literacy, new technologies are developing at such an enormous speed it is nearly impossible to keep up. Librarians, academic computing personnel, and teaching faculty rarely have a chance to discuss pedagogy regarding these issues. The process we went through provided us with that opportunity. [Shaleen Barnes is an Information Services Librarian at UMass Dartmouth in N. Dartmouth, MA. Currently she is working on this project and a general education initiative to incorporate information and computer literacy skills into Critical Reading and Writing, a course required of all freshmen at UMass Dartmouth]
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