How Could Community College Library Support Students In Viewing Information Critically

By Author: Alex Lee
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How could a community college library support students in viewing information critically and seeing themselves as authorities capable of creating knowledge? How could librarians in community colleges translate into practice what Pawley describes as "envisioning information use as a process that involves all users in both consumption and production" ? Mining the pedagogical ore of these questions, Michelle Holschuh Simmons advocates creating alliances among student, discipline-specific instructor, and librarian, with the librarian acting as a "discipline discourse mediator" who makes explicit the tacit ways in which information in a particular discipline is constructed Thomas Sabo.She celebrates historical instances of discipline-specific work in librarianship including the work done in the mid-twentieth century by specialist librarians who created extensive bibliographies in their particular area of expertise.

This work of creating bibliographies, although among the most traditional tasks of the librarian, could exemplify the best practices of a theorizing of IL that is truly ...
... equity centric. If students were apprenticed in compiling bibliographies with discernment; if they were encouraged to seek information in all kinds of formats; if they were taught to annotate them critically; if they were, through publishing the bibliographies online, afforded opportunities to give and receive commentary on their choices and annotations; and, if the bibliographies were regarded as valuable works of creation, useful for the whole local community of scholars, then these bibliographies could truly contribute to an IL pedagogy radiating from equity. This approach might contribute to more equitable educational outcomes for community college students by moving students toward a role of authority and by moving librarians away from the idea that IL is a set of skills. Creating an annotated bibliography that critically examines how specific disciplines' discourses are constructed is a complex process calling for exactly the kinds of qualities Diane Zabel recommends in excellent IL instruction: "integrated, relevant, ongoing, collaborative, and applied". Community college students, some of whom have spent years in skills' oriented classrooms only to test into more skill building in basic reading, writing, and math courses on arrival at college, are especially in need of meaningful, integrated educational endeavors and of IL that involves, to use Annemaree Lloyd's terms from her study of workplace information literacy, a "simultaneous and interrelated process which enacts the individual into the discourse of the context" [32, p. 85]. Contributions toward educational equity might be possible in any academic library where librarians see their job as creating pedagogy for students in the discourses of, for example, English, history, biology, and political science. Community college librarians would especially profit from thinking in terms of IL for discipline-specific discourses, since their libraries serve both transfer students and vocational education students in such disciplines as radiological technology, fashion design, and nursing. Next, returning to an examination of examples from ancient libraries will show that community college librarians need to conceptualize IL in ways that call into question issues of authority and that make explicit the tension in librarianship between aiding and hindering access to information.

The Hattusas Catalog, Hostile Encounters, and Disqualified Knowledge The long tradition of privileging librarians as experts and information from libraries as reliable, a tradition to this day apparent at every level of education, can be seen in another ancient catalog, found in a library in the Hittite capital of Hattusas, south of present-day Ankara Thomas Sabo Bracelets.More elaborate than the two tablets found at Nippur, the Hattusas catalog includes helpful bibliographic details:

"Any priest who needed a ritual for a given problem, instead of picking up tablet after tablet had only to run eye over the entries in the catalogues. It was a limited tool: the order of the entries is more or less haphazard (alphabetization, for example, lay over a millennium and a half in the future) and they give no indication of location".