A core strategic priority of York University Libraries, as articulated in its Information Literacy Manifesto, is to develop information literacy programming designed to graduate students capable of defining their information needs and of identifying, creating, using and communicating information to address research questions or problems at hand. Engagement in needs assessment analysis is one of the ways in which the Libraries strive to achieve this goal.

Business librarian Sophie Bury has a strong research interest in IL and is driven to gain a deeper understanding of York faculty’s perceptions of the importance of information literacy, their students’ IL abilities, and their expectations of what students should be able to know and do in terms of information research.

Her research focuses on gathering data about faculty experiences with and estimation of information literacy instruction, and their opinions of how current approaches to fostering information literacy competencies might best adapt or evolve at York University.

Sophie’s findings are based on a two-stage research process: survey research in stage one (2007-2008) and interview research in stage two (2010).

With regard to the survey findings, it is notable that although the information landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, many findings of this survey research study (see the table) are in line with earlier studies:

• Faculty strongly believe in the importance of developing student IL proficiencies and in the value of collaboration between faculty and librarians in achieving this goal.
  
• They exhibit widespread concerns about students’ abilities, especially among under-graduates at 1000 and 2000 levels.
  
• A majority of faculty are satisfied with librarian-led IL instruction.
  
• The survey shows a disconnect between belief and practice:
• While IL instruction is believed to be very important, almost half of the faculty responding to the survey were non-adopters.
• Although a majority of faculty believe faculty and librarians should jointly assume responsibility for teaching IL, in practice over half of those who choose to incorporate IL in the classroom opt to do so independently.

In contrast to older survey research, however, this study reveals strong concerns about the implications of an ever-growing range of easily accessible, freely available information on the Internet. The many comments received evidence concerns about students’ over-reliance on resources found through Google and an inability to act discerningly and judiciously in using free web resources. Moreover, this survey indicates that faculty assign proportionately higher weighting to IL competencies associated with higher order thinking skills, including the ability to evaluate and synthesize information and to develop an understanding of academic integrity.

This study also contributes new understandings about faculty attitudes and experiences in disciplinary areas, broadly defined [professional schools (business and law), science and engineering, and social sciences and humanities]. Detailed results with disciplinary breakdowns appear in the presentation linked below, but it should be noted that belief in the importance of information literacy and the need for it to be mandated is strong among faculty, irrespective of broad disciplinary area.  It is also notable that the average ranking of undergraduate student IL competencies is higher (to a statistically significant degree) among faculty in the professional schools (business and law) vis-à-vis those in the other two broad disciplinary areas investigated. Finally, 62.5% of faculty in social sciences and humanities indicate that they introduce IL instruction (either solely or collaboratively) in their courses, compared with just 39.6% in science and engineering, and 31.3% in the professional schools.

Stage two of this IL research project, which involves semi-structured interviews informed by grounded theory approaches, aims to delve more deeply into the opinions, motivations and behaviours of faculty regarding IL, and interviews are currently ongoing. Findings from this stage of the research project will be available later in 2010. Sophie, who will take a lead role next year in furthering IL initiatives at the Libraries, intends to share her findings broadly and ensure they play a role in informing the next iteration of the Libraries' IL planning documents.

Sophie has presented her findings from stage one of the research in the U.K.(see http://pi.library.yorku.ca/dspace/handle/10315/2895 ) and has recently submitted an article for publication. She would like to thank those York faculty who have contributed thus far to this research.