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Think Tank Recommendations for Bibliographic Instruction

Bibliographic Instruction

Almost five years ago the Bibliographic Instruction Section (BIS) was formed. Immediately it became one of ACRL’s largest and most active sections, a reflection of the growth and development experienced within bibliographic instruction itself. At its preconference in July, 1981, a Think Tank of “first generation” bibliographic instruction librarians* was organized to discuss the present state and future direction of what now may be considered the bibliographic instruction movement.

The result of the Think Tank’s deliberations is a series of recommendations for the “second generation” of bibliographic instruction librarians, which is here presented. It is not intended to be a definitive statement of all issues facing instruction theorists and librarians; rather it focuses on what the Think Tank members agreed are the most pressing issues facing bibliographic instruction as it moves into what is expected to be a period of maturation.

* Paula Walker, University of Washington; Carla Stoffle, University of Wisconsin-Parkside; Anne Roberts, State University of New York at Albany; Brian Nielsen, Northwestern University; Donald Kenney, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Frances Hopkins, Temple University; and Joanne Euster, San Francisco State University, facilitator.

There are two recurring themes in the document: 1) “building bridges”—to the rest of the profession, to the larger academic community, and the library schools—and 2) consolidating the discipline by fostering research, publication, critical analysis, and development of an underlying pedagogy of bibliographic instruction. It is the hope of the Think Tank members that by sharing their deliberations and conclusions, their work will stimulate widespread discussion and contribute to the growth of bibliographic instruction and to the increase in the quality of library service to the academic community.

I. Integration of Bibliographic Instruction into the Library Profession

The Think Tank members viewed bibliographic instruction as a client-centered approach to library service which has implications for the redesign of all library activities. They rejected the traditional notion of the academic library as a mere adjunct to the education program, which led to the establishment of a type of reference service borrowed almost unconsciously from the public library model. They rejected as well the notion of the library-college, in which the academic library loses its special identity within the institution. The Think Tank further rejected the notion of bibliographic instruction as a secondary activity of library reference departments, and instead viewed it as the very heart of the reference process. Bibliographic instruction advocates are concerned with much more than how reference departments conduct their work. Because they believe that academic libraries should have a central role in the general education of all undergraduates and should actively support education within the academic disciplines, bibliographic instruction librarians are coming to define themselves as a political movement within academic librarianship. Recommendations:

A. Sharing the values which underlie the bibliographic instruction movement should become the means for continuing development of that movement. This can be done by creating support groups for those both “in the trenches” now and those in the “first generation” who have moved into other jobs not identified with bibliographic instruction.

B. As bibliographic instruction concerns arise in other areas of librarianship, the responsibility should be taken to communicate those concerns openly and loudly. Specifically:

1. Leaders in BIS should turn greater attention to ongoing developments outside BIS in order to identify decision points that could affect the future of the movement.

2. Instruction librarians should strive to influence the future directions of ACRL and ALA by becoming involved in sections and committees other than BIS, by seeking office in the associations, and by openly questioning and reviewing candidates for ACRL and ALA offices.

3. Attention should be paid to the areas of technological change, management of academic libraries, and the economic conditions of academic libraries and the processes of information transfer.

II. Integration of Bibliographic Instruction and the Whole of Academic Librarianship into Higher Education

The library is an integral component of an academic institution. It affects and is affected by external factors which impinge on higher education as a whole, such as the economy, the birth pool, and public attitudes toward education; and by internal factors as well, including the organization of the individual institution’s teaching methods and emphasis, curriculum, and quality of faculty expertise. Recommendations:

In order to develop successful library service programs and integrate such programs into the curriculum of the institution, especially programs of bibliographic instruction, it is necessary to do the following:

A. Define the purpose of the academic library, communicate this purpose to the higher education community and investigate useful programmatic structures and activities for fulfilling that purpose.

B. Develop mechanisms to ensure that academic librarians understand the complex power structure of colleges and universities, learn how to analyze the governance and power structures of their own institutions, and learn ways to achieve desired objectives using those structures.

C. Develop a better understanding of the history and nature of higher education in general.

D. Develop means to help academic librarians become aware of and take advantage of changes taking place in higher education. Areas for concern include the renaissance of the general education movement, the concerns for the maintenance of quality teaching, educational standards and basic skills, changes in the nature of the student body, and financial retrenchment.

E. Become aware of and understand the socialization and priorities of faculty. Use this information to improve the library’s involvement in the teaching/learning process.

F. Develop means to capture the attention of college and university administrators and make them aware of the potential of academic libraries and librarians. Demonstrate an understanding of their problems, and show how librarians, particularly bibliographic instruction librarians, can help. Possibilities include publishing articles in higher education publications, attendance at programs of higher education associations, and conducting workshops.

G. Encourage academic librarians to join and participate in discipline associations. Provide a list of discipline association meetings (time, location) yearly and especially encourage librarians in that geographic area to attend and/or prepare papers.

H. Review the basic textbooks of all disciplines. Evaluate what they say and do not say about libraries. Become vocal with publishers about changes needed.

III. Integrating Library Use Skills, Bibliographic Concepts, and Available Technology

Bibliographic instruction is intended to teach students to make intelligent, independent decisions about library use. To be able to use the card catalog, reference sources, or computer terminals to retrieve information on very specialized topics, or to recognize that libraries are classification systems to organize the materials, are fundamental skills that each student should possess. Reduced funding means fewer materials and professional staff are available to library users. It is through effective bibliographic instructional programs that users can be taught to make the most of the available research materials and to exploit all resources at hand.

The ability to retrieve information online needs to be fully incorporated into the instructional program both in terms of the capabilities and the limitations of various information systems. However, in order to teach users to make maximum use of the collection and to develop interpretive and evaluative skills concerning information, it is necessary that instructional programs go beyond the typical “bag of tricks” so prevalent in many instructional programs. Studying and observing the methodologies of other disciplines could enrich bibliographic instruction programs. Adapting and adopting various teaching approaches and methods from these disciplines would enable instructional programs to maintain their vitality and appeal. Recommendations:

It is necessary for all bibliographic instruction programs to integrate skills, concepts, and technology. This can best be achieved if the following goals become guiding principles:

A. All sound instruction is based on the imparting of the basic tenets of a body of knowledge; all instruction should be conceptually based.

B. Technological changes should be adopted to enhance the methods utilized with library instruction. Developing technology, however, should not be viewed as reducing the need for instruction programs.

C. Teaching methodologies of other disciplines should be studied and observed to adapt to bibliographic instruction.

IV. Relationships with the Schools of Library Science

There is general agreement among bibliographic instruction librarians that we need to build bridges with the library schools and their faculties, and encourage them to offer courses in bibliographic instruction so that their graduates possess the skills and specialties that are needed for library programs. Library schools should be encouraged to restructure and refocus their programs to be more responsive to the library market. The leadership in the library profession comes from the practitioners as well as from library school faculty, and instruction librarians, as practitioners, need to exert this leadership on the curriculum, content and direction of library schools. Recommendations:

A. Propose a model program for the library school curriculum for bibliographic instruction. The model program should include a statement of rationale, course content, and materials for the teaching of bibliographic instruction.

B. Maintain a roster of librarians prepared to teach and act as speakers and resource people for courses, workshops, and conferences in bibliographic instruction. Develop a list of library school faculty who are willing to team teach or work with instruction librarians in the area of bibliographic instruction.

C. Indentify library school courses and other graduate school courses which relate to library instruction in method and/or content. Identify library science and other faculty who may have an interest in bibliographic instruction and act as a resource to them for bibliographic instruction information.

D. Promote and publicize bibliographic instruction in library schools by recognizing those which offer courses. Reward those schools by hiring their students and honoring their faculty.

E. Seek collaboration with library school faculty on research projects. Work with them in other professional activities such as conferences and symposia. Provide them with an environment for internship and laboratories in academic libraries.

F. Encourage library school faculty to be active in ALA and ACRL, as opposed to focusing their energies solely on the library educators’ group.

G. Stop sending surveys to library schools asking about their bibliographic instruction curricula. Instead, spend the time and effort on indentifying bibliographic instruction related courses by working with students and faculty in the above recommended manner.

V. Importance of Research

A. Bibliographic instruction should be based on knowledge of the social and intellectual characteristics of the academic disciplines which give rise to their different patterns of scholarly, bibliographic, and encyclopedic literature. Recommendations:

1. Preparation of studies by bibliographic instruction practitioners which review, synthesize, and apply to bibliographic instruction a) analyses by scholars of the goals and methodologies of their own disciplines, and b) analyses by external researchers of the intellectual history, emergent sub-fields, and publication and citation patterns of the academic disciplines.

2. Disseminate such studies to the authors cited and invite those authors to participate in BIS conferences, in order to promote their awareness and criticism of applications of their work to bibliographic instruction.

B. Library research competence has traditionally depended largely on tacit knowledge acquired through the process of socialization to a discipline. While library use has been studied mainly through surveys of user groups and compilation of statistics on services rendered, the behavior of individual users is still largely a mystery. Instruction librarians should make explicit (and thus teachable) the tacit knowledge of experenced researchers and determine the concepts and techniques which should be taught. Recommendations:

1. Record and analyze the library research behavior of scientists and scholars in different disciplines as they move from initial formulation of a research problem through various uses of the literature to the final production of new knowledge.

2. Study the research efforts of students to identify and analyze prevalent patterns of ignorance and misunderstanding.

C. Competency in library research should be a fundamental goal of education. Effective bibliographic instruction contributes to students’ misunderstanding of the nature of learning and scholarship, directly supports their coursework, and helps prepare them for self-directed life-long learning. Recommendations:

1. Bibliographic instruction needs no more justification than instruction in composition or any of the liberal arts, and evaluation studies aimed at justifying its existence are unnecessary.

2. Evaluation studies should be used primarily to improve the effectiveness of existing bibliographic instruction programs and should rarely require dissemination beyond the institution where the data was gathered.

D. Few bibliographic instruction practitioners work in circumstances conducive to ongoing research, and every effort should, therefore, be made to expand the number of researchers in the field. Recommendations:

1. Library and information science faculty in the field of scholarly communication should be made aware of the applications of their work to bibliographic instruction, and their collaboration should be sought in defining research problems suitable for their doctoral students.

VI. Importance of Publication

Literature should serve as a common base for communication among all librarians involved in bibliographic instruction, including academic, school, public, and special libraries. Recommendations:

A. The bibliographic instruction movement should publish a journal of its own which:

1. Maintains an editorial policy directed toward the concerns of bibliographic instruction;

2. Contains substantive articles of high quality;

3. Includes review articles of the bibliographic instruction literature and evaluative reviews of teaching materials and methods from other literature;

4. Is graphically well-designed and professional in appearance.

B. Librarians involved in the bibliographic instruction movement should publish articles in a wide variety of journals in order to disseminate the latest information on bibliographic instruction, to share current research, and to generate scholarly discussion.

1. Journals concentrating on teaching methods are published in many academic subject fields. A list of these journals should be prepared and made available to bibliographic instruction librarians.

2. Journals, such as Change and the Chronicle of Higher Education, are read by administrators. Articles on bibliographic instruction are needed in these publications to reach key people who may not read journals concerning librarianship or teaching methods.

C. Resource materials for teaching library skills and for learning bibliographic instruction methods should be collected, critically evaluated and made available on a selective basis.

1. Materials for use in teaching librarians how to do bibliographic instruction (such as textbooks, course outlines, etc.) should be published.

2. A collection of model exercises and other teaching materials should be maintained.

3. A means should be devised by which materials collected and/or published are evaluated and those evaluations shared with librarians utilizing the materials.

D. An ongoing review should be conducted of the research literature within library/information science and in other academic disciplines having implications for bibliographic instruction (e.g., in scholarly communication, economics of publishing, learning theory). This information should be disseminated to instruction practitioners.