Twentieth Century Libraries and the Three-Legged Stool of Reference Services
The origins of modern library reference services can be traced to one of the first articles ever published in Library Journal, Samuel Green's 1876 paper "Personal Relations Between Librarians and Readers." (1) Libraries at that time consisted of book collections where users were given little or no help in using the materials. Green proposed a new kind of service to bring books, cultural ideas, information, and people together. This service, until recently was referred to as "reference services".
Green described reference services as a three-legged stool with the three legs being information, instruction, and guidance. He proposed that librarians give direct information to busy businessmen and workers, instruct young students on how to use the library, and guide people on both recreational reading and on both recreational reading and on how to conduct research on specific topics.
Four types of libraries emerged in the twentieth century to address these three aspects of reference services. Special libraries have always been information centers. Instead of telling people where and how they can find information, special librarians give their patrons direct information in the form of reports and other documents. From their early history in the early twentieth century, the emphasis in these libraries has not been on instruction, but on giving direct information, with some personal guidance, as needed. In this setting, the quantity, quality, and especially timeliness of information has always been more important than collection size. Academic libraries and school library media centers are also information centers, but their emphasis, especially in recent decades have been on instructing people on how to find information for life-long learning.
Public libraries are community information centers. They are also educational centers, supporting and supplementing public school curricula in their local areas, and serving as the "poor man's university" for adults pursuing many forms of non-formal education (NFE). However, public libraries are also community cultural centers, preserving and promoting the cultural history of their service areas through their programming and activities. The role of guidance has been particularly strong in public libraries in the form of programming, reader's advisory services, book talks, and some informal and usually developmental bibliotherapy, especially for the young.
Academic and School Libraries, Compared
Academic libraries and school library media centers have both emphasized instruction over the provision of information and guidance, especially in recent decades. Academic and school librarians have also often been on parallel tracks for many years without always conversing with each other. Librarians in both settings emphasize giving direct, formal instruction in library and information use to groups of people in the form of classes. Academic and school librarians are all concerned with the use of standards in planning and evaluating information literacy instruction; learning theories; critical thinking; best ways to teach students to plan research strategies, especially for term papers; information literacy theory and philosophy; and teaching techniques. Librarians in both settings see a strong need to tie information literacy instruction to their local curricula, and they do this with varying degrees of sucess.
Academic Library Instruction
Since the early 1970s, academic librarians have created and used standards, objectives, guidelines, learning theories, and conceptual frameworks to create a variety of direct and other forms of instruction for students, faculty, and other members of the university or college community. Over the years, instructional activities have included tours and other forms of orientation; classes in the form of course-related and course-integrated instruction as well as courses; and indirect instruction in the form of electronic and printed handouts, library signage, and the use of other media. Forms of electronic instruction include Powerpoint presentations in electronic classrooms, instruction on and about the Web, video conferencing, and the use of Web CT, Blackboard and other forms of distance education. All of these techniques are used to teach research processes and strategies; the use of catalogs and classification systems in libraries; databases, in general; periodicals and their databases; critical thinking; evaluating general research results, websites and search engines, as well as ways to share information and to do ethical research.
School Library Media Instruction
School library media specialists with their own standards address many of the same concerns as their academic counterparts, but are often more compact, reflecting the age and development of their students as well as the size and quality of their resources. While the quality of both school and academic instructional programs may vary, this is especially true for school library media programs, which differ according to funding levels, size and age of collections, size and state of technology, and many other factors. The amount of formal scheduling can also affect both the quantity and especially the quality of instruction in school library media centers. Media specialist who can set their own schedule of meeting with classes are freer to design their instruction to dovetail with information being studied in the school's classes at the appropriate time. In addition, states vary in the training of their media specialists and schools within a particular school system may offer instruction at the one level, but not another. School media specialists have contributed research on students' information seeking behavior and research strategies and much work on critical thinking. They have also contributed the idea of using webquests and cybertours, where students use a website or a series of websites in order to learn how to find and create research on specific subjects. School media specialists teach students a number of research strategies, but emphasize the Big 6 approach.
It is this author's opinion that good school media instruction prepares students to use most public libraries, and that it lays the foundation for beginning academic library research. High school graduates should know how to use library catalogs, the Dewey Decimal system, and general periodical indexes. They should have been introduced to some research strategies in doing term papers and should be able to use critical thinking to evaluate general research results, information on the web, and search tools. Most good school media programs introduce students to many of these concepts.
However, academic library instruction is still very necessary. Even with good instruction in school media centers, many first year college students experience library anxiety when they encounter college and university libraries that are not only considerably larger than school and public libraries that they had used before, but which have materials not encountered by many students before, such as microforms and government documents. Students usually also have to make a transition from using the Dewey Decimal classification system to using the Library of Congress system. They must learn to move from general databases, like Reader's Guide or Infotrac to more specialized ones and learn to use research, professional, and informed periodicals, instead of more popular ones for their research. In addition, college students go through several more stages of personal psychological development before graduating. This author believes that even good school media programs cannot prepare students for everything that they're likely to encounter in college. However, it makes a real difference whether academic librarians can build on a solid foundation already laid by school media specialists or whether they must start from the beginning and assume that students know nothing.
Public Library Instruction
It is the opinion of this author that public librarians have always conducted more information literacy or bibliographic instruction than they think. However, most traditional public library instruction has taken the form of tours; bibliographies, pathfinders, and other guides, occasional research guides and signage and building design. This type of instruction has been much more informal and indirect than the formal, direct instruction traditionally offered to classes by academic and school libraries. While public libraries have always served as "back up" libraries supporting local public schools, and in their early years, acted as de facto school libraries, they have never planned instructional curricula for whole schools or school systems. However, some public librarians did offer more formal instruction to specific classes when asked to by schools with no libraries or with poor libraries. This author first learned about the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system, not from a school librarian, but from the local public children's librarian, as part of a reading program co-sponsored by the local school system and public library. As a public librarian, this author also gave specific sessions on library use to school classes, as requested, and reported this to her superiors as part of her programming. However, this happened very seldomly and was rarely reported in the library literature.
As cultural institutions, public libraries have conducted a variety of programs and activities that are not viewed as "instruction", but that are related to it. These activities have included reader's advisory services, book talks, bibliotherapy, book discussion groups, and other programming, such as story hours, lectures, performances, lectures, movies, etc. More recently, many public libraries, especially in urban areas have been conducting literacy and English as a Second Language classes, which can be easily tied to more formal information literacy instruction. This is also true for citizenship and other classes designed for recent immigrants. Public libraries have long used marketing research techniques, such as community surveys, advertising, and public relations to plan, design, and implement these programs. Many of these practices can be applied to information literacy programs by all types of libraries.
With information going electronic and with public libraries providing one of the few free access points to the Internet for the poor, public librarians are now doing (or sponsoring) much more direct instruction to patrons. This is very similar to instruction that has been done for some time by academic and school libraries. However, these classes are usually marketed, not as part of an education plan or curriculum, but as a normal part of public library programming and activities, which makes a good deal of sense in this context. In addition, there has been some information literacy initiatives by state libraries, like Librarysmart from the Washington State Library, as well as from official and unofficial national libraries, such as the National Library of Canada or the Library of Congress.
Public libraries have served as community information, education, and cultural centers. They should do more information literacy, but should be able to be more creative in how they do it. They should not have to be identical to school or academic libraries in this regard, even as libraries borrow techniques from each other. Public libraries could offer either individual programs or a series on finding business, career, genealogical, local history, parenting or other information of interest to many people. Storytelling techniques and puppet shows can be used to teach about information. Literacy, ESL, citizenship classes, and other similar programs can be tied more to information literacy. Some book discussion groups and book talks can end with displays or information on how to find out more about the subject being discussed. There can be some very creative possibilities, here. More about this is discussed elsewhere in this database.
Instruction in Special Libraries, Special Collections, and Information Centers
Special libraries and librarians (or information specialists) have differed from all other libraries and librarians in their general focus and philosophy. While school and academic librarians have emphasized instruction, and public librarians have emphasized a combination of information and guidance, special librarians have always emphasized a direct provision of information, not usually in the form of citations, but in the form of reports and recommendations. Much instruction that does occur in special libraries is very individualized, in nature. However, tracer bullets (otherwise known as pathfinders or mini-bibliographies) were created in special libraries like the MIT libraries and the Library of Congress. Information literacy is also one professional compentency, among approximately a dozen of the Special Library Association's Competencies for Special Librarians of the 21st Century.
Business libraries, especially in corporations, represent a very different approach to the provision of information, in comparison to other types of libraries. In the for-profit business world, information is viewed not as something free for everyone, but as a commodity that is not for all. Companies go to great lengths to protect trade secrets, such as Col. Sanders' secret sauce or the recipe for Coca Cola, from their competitors. But even within companies, only certain people may have access to certain information, and in some cases, this is on a "need to know" basis. In the business world, information is used to solve problems and for strategic planning and is often called corporate intelligence. For the most part, the business world is considerably more competitive than cooperative.
Like lawyers and scientists, and unlike humanists, business people will often look for specific bits of information, rather than for overviews, which provide more context, but this is not always true. Timeliness is vital, and in some cases may be more important than accuracy. Many time-strapped managers prefer mediocre information by the deadline to superb information which comes too late to be used for urgent decisions. They also want direct information. (2).
Business information is also very different from that in many other subjects or fields. Some of it is very proprietary or only available to the organization producing the information. Some information is available, but not in published forms. Some business information is "controlled". This means that the use of these materials is restricted to "qualified subscribers". Most business reference sources are produced by specialized publishers. Because of the timeliness of this information, most of it was available on a subscription basis, even before the Internet was widespread. (3) Most of it is now in electronic form.
As a result, corporate librarians do very little information literacy instruction for groups, and what they do is not likely to be mentioned on their webpage, if that is publicly available. Most public and academic business collections that this author informally assessed on the web offered electronic pathfinders as their main mode of instruction, at least on the Internet. However, one public business library, New York Public Library's (NYPL) Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) has an extensive schedule of classes comparable to those in many academic libraries. The sessions emphasize business information on the Internet. Some other business libraries that offer classes and other activities are listed in this database.
Three new fields in the corporate buisness world could have a loage effect on any instructional or other activities in corporate libraries or information centers. They are Knowledge Management, Competitive Intelligence, and Information Architecture. Knowledge Management attempts to take a systematic approach to the use and management of all kinds of knowledge within a firm, both explicit, in the form of databases, company policies, and other records, and implicit, in the form of exployee knowledge, skills, and experience. Knowledge managers encourage the sharing of information within companies. Corporate Intelligence promotes the ethical aspects of gathering and interpreting information on a company's competitors. Information Architecture is concerned with the building of the corporate super websites of the near future. Experts in this field investigate ways that good information can be made more readily available to their audiences by applying the principles of architecture to the design of websites and other information systems.
Medical librarians have a long history of instruction, especially for medical staff, but occasionally for patients and their families, as well. Most of the bibliotherapy movement of the mid-twentieth century was started and led by medical librarians. More recently, medical librarians have tried a number of ways to reach patients with helpful information. The Medical Library Association has two sections with an interest in information literacy instruction and promotion. They are the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section (CAPHS) and the Educational Media and Technologies Section (EMTS). In addition, there are a number of Patient and Family Learning Centers around the country. The one at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston is especially outstanding, with a variety of information literacy instruction activities.
Librarians from special humanities and social sciences collections in academic and in major public libraries also instruct in information use and use other forms of outreach to attract patrons, but these efforts are not always described in detail on the web. The American Association of Law Librarians has a special interest section on Research Instruction and Patron Services. Some research libraries and collections, like NYPL's Humanities and Social Science Library and the University of California, Los Angeles's (UCLA) Chicano Studies Research Center Library offer formal instruction to interested groups. Other research libraries, such as NYPL's Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture offer programming and conferences related to their subject areas, rather than formal information literacy instruction.
More information and perspectives on information literacy in different kinds of libraries can be found in the Washington State Library Librarysmart website, as well as in Esther S. Grassian's and Joan R. Kaplowitz's Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice. (4). Within ALA, the Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) is also concerned with instruction in all kinds of libraries.
References
1. Green, Samuel Swett. "Personal Relations Between Librarians and Readers." Library Journal. 1 (October, 1876) pp. 74-81.
2. Lavin, Michael. Business Information: How to Use It, How to Find It. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx, 1992 pp. 1-2.
3. Ibid. pp. 3-5.
4. Grassian, Esther S. and Joan R. Kaplowitz. Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice. NY: Neal-Schuman, 2001 pp. 337-363.