Civic Engagement and Libraries

Number 5 of the ACRL Standards for Information Literacy is given short shrift by librarians other than in the areas of copyright and plagiarism.

The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.

One learning outcome we have tried to use here at SUNY Oswego is:

Students at the Intermediate (Sophmore/Junior) level will be able to: Appreciate the contributions of shared library resources and of librarians’ expertise to the benefit of communities and organizations

Also here at Oswego, we have made a commitment to "civic engagement", described here in our Civic Engagement Coalition's mission statement:

The mission of the Civic Engagement Coalition at SUNY Oswego is to promote democratic practice and values among students, faculty, and staff to create and coordinate purposeful experiences within and beyond the classroom and to develop knowledge, skills, motivation, and practice necessary for becoming responsible, engaged citizens in a pluralistic, democratic society.

So what can we do with this? First we need to recognize the three ways that community libraries intersect with civic engagement.

First, virtually all public libraries and many academic and school libraries are created through civic engagement. In most cases, one or more community members founded the library in order to benefit that same community.

Secondly, community libraries promote education and literacy and provide a continuing stream of information. As a result, libraries contribute to debates and discourses on public policy and strengthen the practice of democracy. Librarians also defend important human rights and democratic values, such as freedom of speech and equal treatment of all citizens.

Finally, libraries and librarians continue to work and to grow because of the support of their communities and governments. Libraries are in fact the prototype for a particular kind of cooperative civic economics, sometimes called the "commons". Patrons pay their taxes and tuition as their share of support for the library, and do so without a defined expectation of benefit. In most cases, the benefit is limited only by the individuals capacity to read and use the resources of the library.

So libraries serve as a crucible for civic engagement. And this springs not only from the library as "a growing organism," but also from the imperative, "Every reader his or her book," and its corollary, "Books for all."

What is a "Book"?

Ranganathan obviously had bound volumes in mind in 1931. For purposes of my work here and everywhere, I am happy to broaden the term. Here a book is an informative source, no matter the media or format. Sounds simple . . .

I say informative instead of information because information is what happens when someone becomes informed--takes a sign, in the semiotic sense, to be "about" some part of the tangible or intangible world, and to do so in a way that one learns. Information does not happen when you re-read yesterday's news reports unless you see or understand something you did not notice before. Informative indicates that the source has the reasonable potential to inform someone, sometime.

A source is not just a text or document, although to be about the world the source has to appear to follow shared coding and interpretation systems equivalent to those found in texts, documents and language. Any audio or visual material that can be stored and viewed again can be taken as an informative source.

The apparent coding for a source furthers implies an author or speaker. A source is then ultimately one or more persons representing themselves in the source. These persons in turn offer themselves as sources in the context of one or more communities that produce and use the source material.

The only element of a book in 1931 that is not addressed in this definition is the matter of length. The institution of coherent, book-length discourses is important to human society and to our intellectual lives, but length is not a central concern for library practice outside of the provision of shelf or file space. So I am comfortable with thinking of articles and other short sources as books so far as "books [informative sources] are for use."

We Don't Believe in "Skills"--We Don't Care What Students Learn "About"

I came up with these bold propositions in preparation for a presentation on assessment of information literacy programs.

We DON’T . . .

• oBelieve in “skills”
• oCare what students learn “about”

We DO . . .

• oBelieve in big conceptual tools as guideposts to continuing practice
• oBelieve in “Meaningful Learning”
• oCare what students learn “to be”

We are VERY SERIOUS about rethinking the substance of information literacy and connecting library and information use to the lives of our students.

My main point at the time was to look at learning outcomes or goals as the key to designing useful assessments that can inform improvements in teaching and learning, and to raise these questions:

• What are the Big Ideas or Big Tools that students can use through the rest of their lives?
• What is stable and prevalent enough to be useful or be a foundation for learning into the future?
• How can we move past the transmission of information and isolated skills to integrating many kinds of learning?

By the way, we are using rubrics to "measure" students' practices in authentic projects. And yeah, information literacy is about personal and social uses of books and other informative sources.

The Full Text at Last

The full text of the Five Laws is available from the University of Arizona.

The Five Laws of Library Science

At least some of my future posts will be reflections on one or more of the five laws so I thought I should post them for reference.

Books are for use

Every person his or her book

Every book its reader

Save the time of the reader

A library is a growing organism

—from Five Laws of Library Science by S. R. Ranganathan, 1931

My icon

Don't expect to see much here soon. I set this up to get my icon into my profile. My topics down the road may include librarianship, information literacy, situated cognition, public policy, continuous improvement in service organizations, Quakerism, taijiquan and other things about growing up and staying healthy while growing older.

The name of the blog is the first law of library science as stated by S. R. Ranganathan in 1931.