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the Racquette
College Life
May 6, 2016
Jenica Rogers on Information Literacy Jeanette Godreau Contributing Writer
Whether it’s a freshman just starting their college career, or a senior preparing for a professional career, students need to be information literate. Unfortunately, a majority of people who enter college are not only unequipped to handle their alcohol, but are also, more importantly, unequipped to conduct adequate research. In her article titled “Information Literacy and Public Libraries,” Michele Leininger said that a lot of school districts today have good intentions in making their students information literate, but simply do not have the resources. Thus they release hundreds of thousands of students to college, the workforce and the real world without basic information literacy skills, which are becoming more and more crucial to have in their daily lives. But isn’t being information literate just knowing how to “surf the web?” Not exactly. Jenica Rogers, SUNY Potsdam’s director of libraries, explains what information literacy is and why it is important, along with what our college libraries are doing to help students become information literate.
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Why do you think information literacy is important? “I think it is one of those underlying skills that makes so many other things possible... information literacy skills, the ability to find the information you need and to be able to trust that you’ve gotten good information helps us all live our lives. I think it is really a foundational framework for being an educated citizen.” How important do you think information literacy is for college students especially? “Crucial because...college students are very independent about ‘I don’t need anyone to show me how to do this. I can do this.’ And then you run into...the Google problem. Google’s great, but when you are a college student with expectations of performance, of learning, of a kind of rigor in your work and in your thinking, those information literacy skills are absolutely foundational to succeeding and meeting the expectations of the authority figures in your world...and the modern concept of information literacy gives college students those foundations that will allow them to meet those expectations.”
How has SUNY Potsdam’s libraries been teaching information literacy? “In ways that are functional but not really satisfying to us. We do the best we can with what we’ve got. What we wish we could do is to have... a credit bearing course that taught information literacy and research skills… But we are between six and eight librarians... and we just don’t [have the resources]... “What we do instead is we’ve made tutorials that students can do if they are assigned to do them. We’ve also worked to make sure that information literacy is infused in the general education foundation courses. “We also teach about 200 courses a year. They are scheduled at the convenience of the faculty member and tailored to whatever kind of instruction is happening in that class. They are very tailored to specifics, and we reach about 2,000 students a year that way.” If students need help to become more information literate individually, how can they get that help at SUNY Potsdam’s libraries?
“We have a bunch of ways to help people. There is a reference librarian at the research help desk 25 hours a week for drop-ins. We will do research consultations. There are about 20 hours a week where librarians are available to have consultations scheduled, where you make an appointment, and the librarian will do a little bit of pre-research [on your research topic] and then sit down, oneon-one, and talk you through what they did, what you need to do next, where to go from here. “We also have AskUs 24/7, which is a 24/7 online librarian hotline... It’s just online chat... and a librarian somewhere in this country will help you [with your problem]. And we have Libanswers... on our website [and] it’s a knowledge base of questions people have asked us and the questions [and answers] are recorded there.” Do you think the teaching of information literacy in SUNY Potsdam’s libraries needs to be improved in anyway? “Yes, we need a broader reach. We have talked for a long time about the need to work with departments when they are setting their learning
outcomes for graduates. We also know that we don’t reach as many students in this coursebased instruction that we could. And we’d like to teach a credit based research skills class but all of those things require more human resources than we have. So we prioritize based on what seems most important this year.” How does SUNY Potsdam’s teaching of information literacy compares to other colleges on average? “I say we are sort of firmly in the middle of the pack. We are, I think, ahead of many of our peers in building relationships with faculty... We teach a lot of classes and we do a lot of customized instruction and that is also something that we are leaders in. “What we are not as good at as some of our peers is the integration, where they have information literacy as a more formalized part of the students’ education... We don’t have courses where librarians are instructors... We are an academic unit, but we are not a department.” — Continued on page 5 —
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