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

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by David K. Kohl

Perhaps one caution is appropriate in this area. Most of the outcomes reported in the early days of library instruction involved students self-reporting on their satisfaction with library instruction courses or lectures. While this is not inappropriate, it is not necessary for library instruction programs to limit themselves to such subjective measures. At the University of Illinois, for example, we were able to determine a measurable increase in the sophistication and quality of students' bibliographies as independently verified by both librarians and course instructors. In short, students did not just feel good about instruction classes, they were actually able to make better use of information resources in meeting their course requirements.

CONCLUSION

It is perhaps ironic, in a period when faculty status for academic librarians has stalled--even reversed--that the teaching mission for librarians has become so important. While seeing one-on-one reference service as teaching is by no means inappropriate, present day economic and technological pressures mean that we must move beyond this model. There is much we can learn from traditional teaching colleagues who are, in many cases, trying to reclaim their teaching role. Nevertheless, whether through greater use of the traditional classroom approach or through the innovative use of technology, our central goal has to be finding ways to leverage the limited library professional public services resources available to us to fulfill our central public services mission--i.e., providing intellectual access to the library's resources. A critical key to this process is library instruction, not necessarily as we have been doing it, but as we need to be doing it--by making fundamental improvements.