Faculty culture and bibliographic instruction: an exploratory analysis - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Larry Hardesty

INTRODUCTION

Boyer (1987), in one of the most important books on undergraduate education, College: The Undergraduate Experience in America, wrote: "We found the library at most institutions in our study to be a neglected resource" (p. 160). What is remarkable about Boyer is not so much that he reached this conclusion but that he even mentioned the library at all. Boyer's book is the first major publication on undergraduate education in recent years that not only included the library but also promoted bibliographic instruction (Farber, 1992, p. 2). Unfortunately, Boyer does not appear to have started a trend since discussions of bibliographic instruction remain conspicuously absent from higher education literature.

Bibliographic instruction has a long history among academic libraries dating to at least the 1880s (Hardesty & Tucker, 1989). In recent years, proponents can point to the steady, perhaps dramatic, movement of bibliographic instruction and its adoption by librarians (Farber, 1992, p. 2). Nevertheless, efforts, both historically and currently, to enhance the role of the academic library in the educational process can be described as "uncertain" (Hardesty & Tucker, 1989).

In his classic study, Teaching with books, Branscomb (1940) found such limited use of the library by most college students during the 1930s that he asked "whether we need these large libraries, if present teaching methods continue" (p. 8). A decade later, the eminent librarian Louis Round Wilson (Wilson et al., 1951) raised a similar issue when he wrote: Although colleges spend a considerable portion of their educational budgets for library materials and services, the contribution that libraries make to furthering the education program is less than it should be" (p. 13).

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Knapp pioneered modern bibliographic instruction through such efforts as the Monteith College Project (Knapp, 1956, 1964, 1966). Shores (1968) also attracted widespread attention to the library's role in higher education through his library-college movement. Nevertheless, as the 1960s ended, Phipps (1968) found that many librarians involved in bibliographic instruction were frustrated, disappointed, and demoralized because of "lack of staff, lack of time, lack of money for experimentation, lack of cooperation and interest from the faculty [emphasis added] and the administration" (p. 12).

The modern period of bibliographic instruction can be dated from Farber's presentation in 1969 to the College Libraries Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries followed by Kennedy's (1970) article in Library Journal With Farber's presentation and Kennedy's article, the Earlham College program became widely known. By the early 1970s, bibliographic instruction had emerged as an authentic movement with its own annual conference at Eastern Michigan University. Bibliographic instruction champions would have their own section within the Association of College and Research Libraries by the mid-1970s and their own journal, Research Strategies, by the 1980s. By the 1990s, even some regional accreditation agencies had started to recognize the importance of bibliographic instruction (Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, 1994).

Even with this significant progress, there remains a nagging feeling that bibliographic instruction has yet to be widely accepted outside the library, particularly by a large portion of the faculty. Recently, Jacobson and Vallely (1992) concluded:

Despite the fact that bibliographic instruction has transformed and

reshaped the manner in which college and university reference staffs

define their role, and notwithstanding the substantial number of

students and classroom teachers involved in BI programs, our

teaching faculty colleagues have not, as a group, integrated BI into

the body of materials they feel it is essential to have students learn.

(p. 362)

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library Resources funded programs to enhance the library's educational role, and about $3 million went to more than fifty academic libraries. In 1980, Gwinn (1980) reviewed these programs, and her review closed an important chapter in the history of bibliographic instruction. She found librarians' difficulties with faculty members frequently mentioned among the largest problems in establishing programs. The difficulties included: (1) poor cooperation from faculty [emphasis added], (2) faculty and administrative turnover, and (3) lack of adequate planning input from faculty [emphasis added]. She concluded with the understatement: "Bibliographic instruction programs in general, have not caused a major revolution among the American teaching faculty" (p. 10). Shortly afterward, Whitlatch (1983) further concluded: "In the United States, the tradition in faculty teaching does not involve extensive use of the library nor encourage students to use the library to formulate research topics or independent inquiries" (p. 149).