As time goes by…: revisiting fundamentals - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by David K. Kohl

In my experience, most veteran public service academic librarians have a good sense of the kinds of library skills and knowledge base which first year students need to have, of the additional skills which juniors and seniors need, and of the specialized skills required of graduate students. And as public service personnel interacting daily with professors and students, they have the necessary background to have an intuitive sense of how subject content and student diversity need to be integrated. It just requires some thought, some time, and much hard work to formalize this understanding and express it as a focused and integrated curriculum.

The main problem is not that developing a curriculum is impossible, but that librarians have not traditionally posed the issue to themselves in these terms. In contrast, the concept of the "reference interview" is widespread and evokes a rich context of experience, research, and professional dialogue for academic public service professionals. "Curriculum development" (a reflexive mantra for the traditional teaching faculty) needs to become, for instruction librarians, as familiar and rich a concept as "reference interview."

Although we have begun the process of developing an integrated instruction curriculum at Cincinnati, we are finding that library faculty are as independent as their traditional faculty counterparts. Such faculty independence, in conjunction with the newness of the concept, makes for slow going. Still, we are making progress and are particularly hopeful that the concept of an instruction curriculum will pay large dividends in the future.

FOCUSING ON OUTCOMES

The final problem--the legacy of a pragmatic Topsy-type childhood--is the ease with which one can lose one's way, wasting time and resources on misguided or trivial efforts. As Yogi Bera once commented: "Unless you know where you're going, you're not likely to get there." At the University of Cincinnati, a review of our instruction goals revealed that we were devoting considerable staff time and resources to a dubious library component of the Freshman English program. We were going through many motions, but the result was not satisfactory or even all that clear. We have, therefore (with some trepidation), indicated that we will not continue to participate in the program based on the past. Until we undertook a review of expected outcomes, success was measured by the amount of effort put into the process rather than by desired results--namely, what we expected students to learn.

There is also a practical advantage to outcomes. As legislatures and accrediting agencies are increasingly calling for outcomes-based education, such demand provides an opening for the library instruction agenda. In Colorado, a legislative call for outcomes-based education provided an opportunity for the library to define information literacy as one of the ten outcomes of a university education. Having such an official statement provided a tremendous advantage for the development and acceptance of library instruction.