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

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Larry Hardesty

a perfunctory use of materials and dedicated examination of the

rich store of scientific literature typically available in most college

libraries. (p. 3)

A few years later, Carlson and Miller (1984) again emphasized the importance of faculty. They wrote:

No matter how hard librarians work, without the cooperation and

support of teaching faculty, the BI program will be unsuccessful or

severely limited. This happens because the attitude of the faculty is

a major determinant in the response of students to the program.

(p. 486)

Most recently, writing in the early 1990s, Lipow (1992) justified the importance of working with faculty members in strictly pragmatic terms:

They [faculty] see the students more often, much more often, than

we do. They initiate their students' library assignments. To the

extent that faculty are misinformed or uninformed about the library,

their students will be misinformed or uninformed; and conversely,

the better the faculty's understanding of the library, its resources

and services for themselves, the more likely their students will have

that better understanding. (p. 10)

Farber, longtime head librarian at Earlham College--now retired--and a strong proponent of the importance of working directly with faculty for course-related bibliographic instruction, advocated his view based on both political necessity (Farber, 1974b, p. 160) and educational desirability (Farber, 1992, p. 1).

There is little doubt among most bibliographic instruction librarians that, for bibliographic instruction programs to be successful, librarians need the cooperation and support of faculty. Why then do many faculty members expect, even demand, the development of relatively large library collections but often resist efforts by librarians to teach students how to use these collections? The answer can be found in the analysis of the culture of faculty.

CULTURE

Schein (1992), in his classic work Organizational Culture and Leadership, wrote: "Culture as a concept has had a long and checkered history" (p. 3). Trice and Beyer (1993) traced, from the 1930s to the present, a small but steady stream of research conducted on organizations from a cultural perspective, mostly by sociologists and anthropologists. They concluded:

Cultural processes underlie much of what happens in modern organizations.

Culture filters the ways in which people see and understand

their worlds. Culture prescribes some behaviors and forbids

others. Culture colors the emotional responses that people have to

events. (p. xiii) Schein (1992) supports the study of the culture of organizations with the following rationale:

If we understand the dynamics of culture, we will be less likely to be

puzzled, irritated, and anxious when we encounter the unfamiliar

and seemingly irrational behavior of people in organizations, and

we will have a deeper understanding not only of why various groups

of people or organizations can be so different but also why it is so

hard to change them. (pp. 4-5)

In the realm of bibliographic instruction, our puzzlement, irritation, and anxiety regarding the faculty may be best expressed by the following question asked by Farber (1992): "If BI [bibliographic instruction] is so good, and can make such an important contribution to student learning and to teaching effectiveness, why is there so much resistance to it by teaching faculty" (p. 2)?