Last week I attended an EBSCO training session that was quite good. Aimed more at the K-12 and public libraries crowd, it was very informative as I’d never ever even noticed that EBSCO has search interfaces geared towards kids. I was especially glad to see that one (Student Research Center) lets you narrow by reading level. There have been a few occasions when that would’ve been handy.
What surprised me, though, was that a few of the school librarians in attendance didn’t seem to be familiar with it either. In Oklahoma our state library makes available certain EBSCO (and other) databases to all libraries through Digital Prairie. For many school libraries — and probably many of the smaller public libraries as well — this is the only access they have to these resources. If the school librarians aren’t aware of them, it’s no wonder even our fresh-from-high-school students often don’t know what to do when faced with a database.
I’m not trying to blame students’ lack of information literacy on school librarians. This state has a lot of very small, very rural school districts, and education funding is far from a top priority with our legislature. I don’t even want to speculate on the age and condition of the copmuters in some of these schools. What this makes me wonder, though, is this: how do we know what level to teach to when conducting information literacy classes?
The education a student gets in the larger school districts can be very different than one obtained in the smaller ones. We’ve had student employees here at the library who had graduating classes numbering in the low teens, and even a few in the single didgets. Some of those students do just fine, others struggle a bit before finding their stride, and still others suffer from culture shock and the inability to deal with needing remedial courses after graduating first in class.
But there’s no real way of knowing where students fall on this continuum prior to an instruction session, and asking for a show of hands on who has used a library catalog before isn’t much help either.
So there are actually two parts to information literacy: knowing how to use all the resources to which you have access, but also knowing how to present those resources to various audiences.
Anyway, what’s brought all this on is that today was new faculty orientation and I’m wondering how many of them have any idea what to expect from the students here. The students change everything.
