Faculty Guide to Library Instruction

Butler's Information Literacy Program

Butler Libraries provides information literacy instruction throughout a student's undergraduate/graduate experience. The key curriculum areas targeted include:

1. The Core Curriculum's First-year seminar (FYS) - To meet the the FYS research learning outcome:  "Students will carry out research for the purpose of supplying evidence and support for claims made in exposition and argument," students receive an introduction to information literacy concepts and skills through classroom library instruction session(s).  
2. Discipline instruction - Subject Librarians work with their assigned colleges/majors to provide discipline-specific IL at key points within a major's curriculum.  Many librarians have worked with their majors and mapped where, within a curriculum, where IL instruction should be incorporated.  

Pedagogical Foundations

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) endorsed the original Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education in 2000, and college and universities began using these as a guidepost for developing information literacy curriculums.  The standards are a set of sequential steps identifying how to:  Identify an information need; access the needed information; evaluate information critically; utilize  information to support a thesis or position, and use information ethically and legally. 

In 2016 the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) approved a new Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. This is a cluster of "conceptual understandings that organize many other concepts and ideas about information, research, and scholarship into a coherent whole." Here are the six frames:

• Authority is constructed and contextual
• Information creation as a process
• Information has value
• Research as inquiry
• Scholarship as Conversation
• Searching as Strategic Exploration

Butler librarians use both the original standards and the new framework in teaching information literacy.

Butler Libraries adheres to the standards and guidelines developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries:

• Guidelines for Instruction Programs in Academic Libraries
• Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
• Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (sunsetted by ACRL June 2016, now the Frames)