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Aligning information literacy with the faculty teaching and learning agenda.

Article Excerpt
The Science Library at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) was established in 1999 as the result of the amalgamation of two, smaller branch libraries, and is situated in Hobart's main campus,, Sandy Bay.

The Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) is a major client of the Science Library and is made up of 12 schools and six research units. The faculty teaches and researches in a range of disciplines comparable to those offered at larger Australian universities.

The establishment of the Science Library provided an opportunity to reinvigorate outreach to faculty and information skills teaching, both activities having been dormant or low-key for some time. This reinvigoration occurred at a time when, in the Australian higher education environment, there was a move away from library-centred ownership of information skills training, toward a shared ownership with faculty for teaching information literacy.

This transition has not come about without initiative, energy and a shared commitment from both librarians and academics to improve the teaching and learning in their universities. Librarians and academics from most faculties at UTAS have discovered this shared commitment in each other. Since this discovery, relationships and collaborative efforts have developed between science librarians and academics in SET. The library has become part of broader faculty and school teaching and learning initiatives. Collaboration between academics and librarians has produced pockets of good practice and useful models of information literacy teaching.

Good relationships, shared commitment and emerging models of information literacy teaching led to a SET information literacy project in 2004. This project recognises the need to embed information literacy skills (ILS) into the curriculum and to teach ILS in a structured and incremental manner appropriate to the discipline. (1) Two survey instruments were developed: one based on a QUT survey to measure the current information skills of students; the other to map the explicit teaching of ILS across the faculty. Both instruments were linked to the information literacy outcomes in the Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework (ANZILF). (2)

The project is the first step toward a strategic, faculty-wide approach that aims to ensure that all SET students develop information literacy as part of the broader range of generic skills. The project has already had an impact on improving information literacy teaching within SET and is informing a current teaching and learning project on generic attributes.

Relationship Building and Collaboration: A Short History

Building a Case for Teaching Information Skills

In 1999 the Science Library injected new life into its information skills program by targeting first-year undergraduate students and, at the other end of the continuum, honours and research students. This initiative achieved three things: it met the information skills needs of strategically important groups; was central to the library's outreach strategy; and provided an insight into the information skills level of its client groups.

A zoology first-year unit was the only first-year unit in SET with an information skills component, and one of few delivered to undergraduate SET students as a whole. The information skills component included an assessable worksheet that was marked by librarians. The results of the worksheet provided an insight into the effectiveness of the program; for example, only one third of the group demonstrated a sound ability to formulate effective search strategies. (3) The library used the student results data to produce a report that reflected on the effectiveness of the program and the skills of students.

At the same time workshops for honours and research students and staff provided an opportunity to gather feedback from participants and another perspective for librarians to observe the skills levels of participants. Similar to the zoology program, formal feedback was used to develop reports on the initiative.

The experience with undergraduate, honours and research students enabled the library not only to reflect on the effectiveness of its initiative, but perhaps more importantly to build a case for the faculty to become involved in expanding the teaching of information skills and to improve the way information skills were taught.

The reports were central to discussions with individual academics, in staff meetings and other faculty forums. In this way the library signalled its interest in teaching and learning and its eagerness to work with academics. There were tangible outcomes of these discussions and the responsiveness of academics. In 2000, programs were introduced in first year agriculture, third year plant science and third year chemistry.

These outcomes indicate that the library had been able to show, by documenting experience and feedback from training and teaching initiatives, that students' grasp of information skills...