Information Literacy Instruction: We All Have a Role

The Libraries are committed to the goal of seeing York University students graduate with a level of "information literacy" (IL) that will allow them to become effective lifelong learners for career success, for making a contribution to their community, and for personal fulfillment. Librarians, through their reference and instructional encounters with students, ideally in close collaboration with course instructors, strive to teach students how to find, evaluate, and use information both in their course assignments and in their lives after graduation.

We believe that by the end of their stay at York University, students should have acquired the basic research skills needed to:

• Identify the nature and extent of information needed to address a problem.
• Identify sources for the required information and devise a strategy for acquiring it.
  
• Evaluate the quality and credibility of the information found.
  
• Analyze and synthesize the information effectively in relation to the original problem.
  
• Understand the principles of academic integrity and the ethical aspects of information and its use

The Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), has developed a set of Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, which has been widely endorsed by Canadian academic libraries.

Librarians at York gave over 500 IL classes this year in which they introduced these essential concepts to more than 12,000 students. Because librarian time is limited, however, and because there are so many students and so many individual course offerings at York, it is not possible for librarians to reach everyone through such classes alone. To address this challenge, the Libraries would like to take a more programmatic approach to the delivery of IL instruction so that our limited resources can be deployed in as rational and effective a way as possible to achieve the goals noted above.

To this end, we have established this year for the first time a Libraries-wide Information Literacy Committee and are in the process of recruiting a librarian who will dedicate a significant portion of his/her time to improving IL instruction and articulating a process for the IL program's development. Through these initiatives, we hope to further develop the IL teaching skills of our librarians, to devise ways of assessing the needs of students and measuring our successes, to improve our communications on IL-related matters with the York community, to find ways of working more closely with course instructors (who will always have an important role in teaching students to be critical users of information), and to develop online IL tutorials and other resources to be used by librarians or even course instructors.

Because there is no single approach to instruction that will satisfy all needs, librarians have been experimenting with the teaching of IL concepts in a number of ways that are different from the more typical, though not always ideal, one-session guest lectures and workshops that we offer upon request. We are proud of the energy and creativity of our librarians, and we encourage you to share with us any ideas you may have for collaborating in the teaching of IL skills to our students.

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