Page 68 - DLIS102_LIBRARY_AND_ITS_USERS

Unit 11: User Education

Dramatic changes in technology and society are having a considerable impact on libraries and their Notes
instruction programs. These changes have created an urgency to teach users how to become more
effective, efficient, and independent in their information searching. In response to this, the goals of
library user education have expanded from teaching tools to teaching concepts and from library
instruction to information literacy and lifelong learning.
The Gateway to Information, developed by the Ohio State University (OSU) Library, is one response
to the current issues and problems and those foreseen in the future of libraries and information. The
Gateway to Information was designed to help undergraduate and graduate students identify, find,
evaluate, and select the most useful information for their needs without help screens or handouts.
The Gateway guides users in applying search strategy concepts and critical thinking to their
information seeking.
Under development since 1987, The Gateway to Information has been continuously evaluated by
users; revisions have been made based on the results of more than 7,000 evaluations. The Gateway
is available on most public terminals in the OSU library system. It will soon be accessible via the
Internet and will integrate the sources of the Internet into its narrative. The information explosion
has hastened the need for development of expert systems like this.
The origins of library user education can be traced back more than 170 years. The earliest evidence
of instruction—a librarian lecturing to undergraduates—was found at Harvard College in the 1820s.
Most early academic librarians were professors with part-time library appointments who taught
the use of libraries for academic purposes. Library lectures were the chosen form of instruction by
such institutions as Harvard, Indiana University, and Columbia. Separate courses were implemented
in the late 1800s by Ray Davis at the University of Michigan, Azariah Root at Oberlin College, and
others. Over the next few years, about seventeen other institutions adopted instruction lectures or
courses.
By 1900, six of the seventeen institutions examined were no longer providing library instruction,
and by 1903, instruction had been dropped by two more institutions. These instruction activities
existed from one to fifteen years with an average of about five and a half years (Hernon, 1982, p. 25).
Why were these programs of such comparatively short tenure? In the 1860s, social changes and
developing technology shaped education and its goals. These same factors led to the early rise and
rapid decline of library instruction between 187(land 1914).
As academic libraries grew in number, however, librarians became concerned about making
collections accessible, and the importance of library instruction again became apparent. In the early
1900s, the resurgence was led by William Warner Bishop and William Frederick Poole who espoused
concepts of library instruction that are valid today. They wanted to make students independent
learners and to clarify the role of the library in the university. In 1912, Bishop noted that librarians
and professors were looking at methods of library instruction and doing some experimenting
(Tucker, 1979, p. 273). These were largely individual efforts and did not result in established
programs. There was some advocacy for course-related instruction instead of the separate course,
but the concept was not developed.

Content

Content covered and methods used are central to understanding the current status of user education
programs. For more than a decade, the consensus has been that library user education should focus
on the many sources of information available and not on the mechanics of using the system. Many
instruction librarians have espoused, and continue to espouse, the search strategy approach because
it provides a conceptual framework for teaching students research techniques. This idea has dominated
library instruction since the mid 1970s because it is a simple and adaptable teaching framework. It
teaches the use of different types of tools and resources and provides an outline for systematic

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