Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Academic librarians have been kicking around the idea of threshold concepts ever since a revision of the familiar information literacy standards proposed that we could rethink our approach to instruction in the art and craft of inquiry. The new Frameworkproposes several big ideas that could inform the learning that happens in our libraries. 

I have a confession to make. For many years, I’ve done odd jobs for Bedford Books, which specializes in writing handbooks as well as other textbooks. One of the projects I worked on had a nifty free website, Research and Documentation Online. Chances are, a lot of you have links to this site on your library or course page. If you click on it now, though, you’ll find out that it’s not there anymore.

When the Standards for Information Literacy Competency in Higher Education  [http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency ] came out in 2000, I thought they were a step forward. We were broadening our concept of information literacy, which was (at last) far more than the nuts and bolts of how to use a library. I thought at the time that it made it very clear that information literacy had to be a campus-wide endeavor, not a library project.

So, let’s say I’m doing research on issues related to privilege and inequality. Google Scholar tells me there’s a an article on stratification in higher education that’s looks interesting. Here’ another one on how postcolonial theory can inform resistance to neoliberalism in universities. And ooh, this looks really interesting: digital inequality and participation in the political process. How great that academics turn their methods and theories to solving the problem of inequality. Too bad most people won't be able to read these articles.

It’s funny how much the popular image of libraries is highly traditional, considering how fascinated by the future librarians typically are and how quickly librarians embrace new technologies. References to shushing never seem to go away, and in an era when most of the library’s budget goes to licensed content, the firm belief that libraries are still mostly about books is hard to shake. We could fold into this the gendered nature of the image of librarians, who are imagined to be prim women of a certain age who wear buns and sensible shoes while doing hyper-clerical work whereas IT folks are inventive, adventurous young men with a deep knowledge of secret arts.  Yet despite the image (and I can’t wait to read a new book about it) librarians’ work is deeply tied to technology. Likewise, librarians seem to continually try to predict the future in terms of technological change, as they do in a special Horizon Report about library futures.