Don’t Leave It To Them: An Information Literacy Model From the Bell Tower

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 4/30/2009

For years, academic librarians have searched for ways to engage with faculty in collaborative partnerships. The good news is that new cooperative ventures are underway on campuses across the country, catalyzed by the information literacy movement. 

Faculty are acknowledging that the way to help students improve their research skills, make better information decisions, avoid plagiarism, and move off the path of least resistance is to integrate the library into their teaching and learning space. There is reason to be hopeful about these efforts, and we may get there just yet.

Unfair, wrongheaded, and irresponsible
There are still many areas of academic librarianship, however, that have a long way to go when it comes to motivating faculty. In a Chronicle piece titled “Blind Spots,” Johanna Drucker, professor of information studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and Digital Humanities Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, writes that faculty (humanists in particular) are “unfair, wrongheaded and irresponsible” when they shirk their responsibilities to collaboratively build the digital libraries of the future.

But she also takes aim at you and me, the librarians who typically manage higher education local digitization projects, when she writes that the digitization of our literature and scholarship is too important to just “leave it to them.” Drucker’s concern is that librarians and information technologists, while good at digitizing the collections and organizing them, should not be making critical decisions about what to digitize and how to capture everything accurately. That, she says, is the role of the faculty, who must weigh in important questions:

 What version of a work should be digitized as representative of a work? Is Leo Tolstoy’s original Russian text of War and Peace sufficient or irrelevant for future generations? Will those generations prefer access to the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation? Or to the more recent translation by Anthony Briggs? Should we digitize the sanitized version of Mark Twain’s classics, purged of language now offensive to readers, or the originals that allow the historical distance of culture and vocabulary?

An information literacy model
The answers are not obvious. And while Drucker raises good questions, she has little to offer in the way of a solution. So let me suggest something: why not use a model for librarian-faculty collaboration on digitization projects that’s based on work with information literacy?

The best information literacy initiatives involve librarians and faculty working together to identify learning outcomes, deciding where in the curriculum those outcomes are achieved, and jointly developing assessment measures. They often begin in administrative meetings, not in the classroom. 

With support from the administration, the two parties can spend time working together to forge a program that meets the needs of faculty and their students, yet provides librarians with ample opportunities to engage in the teaching and learning process at their institutions.

A similar model can be applied to the challenge of wisely planning our digital future. Librarians hold the collections and have the technical expertise in their organizations. What we need to add to the equation is the faculty. 

So let’s begin by raising the issues and then addressing them as an organizational challenge that requires an information literacy-like approach. If we can convince faculty of the value of such a project and the power of collaboration, we can attack the digitization challenge together and change it from being about “them” to being about “us.”

Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.  For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his web site.

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