#ecil2018 Unique or ubiquitous: IL instruction outside Higher Education

Miriam Matteson and Beate Gersch from Kent State University teach an  Information Literacy module to students at the information school which includes learning theories and principles of IL. Iinitially they assumed that students would be teaching IL in an academic library but it became clear that many of the students were already working in a public library context. So the course had to address IL teaching in this context. There is a lack of standards and frameworks for IL teaching in this context, where the educational purpose is implied rather than being overt as it would be in the academic library context. In addition the academic year is very structured and opportunities for teaching fit within this, which is not the case in public libraries. The vast majority of literature on IL is situated in the academic library context. The researchers did an environmental scan of the extent of IL instruction present in web guides and teaching offered as presented on library web sites. They browsed the websites and ranked the material for the level of IL present. 59 programs were coded as providing some IL, 3 as entirely IL, and 70 as no IL. Most programs provided guidance on accessing and communicating information.

Phase 2 of the research was a diary study of 5 working days of 21 librarians, most of whom were professionallly qualified. Participants completed an initial questionnaire, and then completed the diary recording the nature of any IL teaching they did. central themes emerged: IL is core to Librarianship, it is focused on learning, but there was a lack of formal  policies around IL- it was implicit. The most common area of IL instruction was in defining information needs, and the time spent teaching was most commonly 6-10 minutes. Technology demos were popular, with some reference queries. The lines between reference and instruction are blurred in public libraries, raising questions about how librarians see their roles, and whether they see themselves as teachers or not. Computer literacy seems to be a big part of information literacy in this context, so do we need to re-define what IL is for this context.
Pam McKinney