Comparativa de bases y niveles de cálculo

agreed that an embedded approach to IL development is ideal. They recognised the importance of identifying core courses that would support IL development for a greater number of students:

B: Having them embedded as part of the whole programme [so] that they are not incidental. They are important components … and they make up [part of] something bigger at the end.

NZ university librarians recognised that they had a limited scope in how much they could support students’ IL development given both physical and curriculum constraints, and the students’ limited exposure to explicit IL development outside the library:

A:The university requires people to be information literate, but it doesn’t always do enough to make this a reality.

They emphasised that gaining academics’ support for developing IL was an important factor for students’ IL development (see 2.6):

C: Academics are the best people to advertise your courses and library stuff … The weight they carry when they say ‘hey, this is really good’, has a lot more weight than a librarian going ‘hey, we’ve got great things, hey, look at our nice pamphlet – come along!’. Targeting the academics to get them to advocate the students coming along [is] a far more motivating factor.

Thus, a key message reinforced at all institutions was that academics have as much responsibility as librarians to support students’ IL development. Academics can support students to transform information into knowledge of the discipline and effectively communicate the new knowledge to contribute to future disciplinary conversations (see 2.6.2).

However, a key barrier to gaining academic instructor buy-in was the perception that embedding IL into content courses would take significant time and space in the curriculum:

B1: I’m approached with the problem of time – they don’t have enough time in their courses to have these skills development when they are trying to get their content across. My take is that they just may need to make slight variations to their course and their assignment topic to have it become an information literacy type assignment. G: It’s time too; we’ve got very short semesters now – 12 weeks – and every hour is precious to the academics.

All librarians felt constrained by the limited time allocated to IL development in first year courses and throughout the undergraduate programmes. Many were brought in to lectures to deliver a 50-minute one-shot introduction, or had limited space for workshops for generic or discipline-specific instruction outside the curriculum:

A: We have a one-hour lecture and one-hour tutorial in the second and fourth years. The thirds have an online tutorial. First year is a one-hour hands-on and a library tour where we tell them a load of stuff they need to know for how to record a book or find it on the shelves. So one or two hours is all we are going to get.

G: In orientation week, they come to the library for – it used to be three hours, but it got cut back to two hours because of pressure on the time from other parts of the system. But we have them for two hours, and we call it ‘deep immersion’. They all have to be aware of the catalogue, how to use the catalogue. The journals we refer them to have [discipline] in the title. It’s very hands-on in terms of finding information.

Any time allocated was largely spent on introducing students to library resources (catalogues, databases and physical layout), and little time was attached to supporting students to become more effective at searching with the tools they already use, i.e. Google and Google Scholar:

A: We don’t really focus on Google Scholar, per se. It’s there as a database, but our focus is much more on the subject-related databases. [Our institution] really prides itself on having extremely strong resources across the board for students, and Google Scholar … we don’t actively promote it. … It’s used as an adjunct or a quick and dirty entry point. If something is a bit obscure, then sometimes you can pick up something from that and you think ‘Ah, let’s follow through on that journal’ and then we can go into databases.

Librarians identified challenges connected to offering generic IL introductions or sessions aligned with specific assessment tasks; however, they criticised generic instruction for lacking context:

F: Actually one of my pet topics is that one of the big things I think is missing from a lot of our traditional information literacy instruction is it doesn't have a context that the student can relate to – it's teaching a technique in the absence of need and the students sort of go 'yeah whatever, that's cool' and forget about it. So we really want to, especially with the core class, focused ones, have the students know what the information need is going to be and tie it to an assignment.

However, concerns over the transferability of the competencies learned were evident in task-specific sessions:

G: There's also a risk when you're doing a thing at point of need that the essence of lifelong learning perhaps gets put to the background, just because the students are seeing this as "I need to do this for this assignment".

Other librarians took a broader subject-specific, rather than task-specific, approach to encourage transferability of the learning. Several recognised that the key to encouraging IL development was engaging the students in the research process and raising awareness of the importance of IL to learning and future career opportunities:

B: I think one of the key things that we endeavour to do is to teach them the process of research and the value of utilising databases for up-to-date information and being able to access the catalogue using guided keyword searching to bring up the published material within the areas that they're looking at. We're working on the assumption that once they have the process of doing research, that should stand them in good stead. Whereas, if we went to their specific assignment, they would only be focusing on that assignment and not looking at the wider spectrum with a view to the future and their careers, and what they're doing in third year, and what they'll do in their Masters, and all those types of things.

H: If we can convey just an interest in and an excitement and a natural curiosity about information researching then, hopefully, that's going to show students that it's not just a matter of “can we use a database to clip out a few articles to write a paper”. This is something that you really can carry with you forever. You're always going to need these skills whether it's in your job or you're trying to find a job or you're trying to pursue an interest.

Most librarians indicated the importance of revisiting IL strategies over the full undergraduate degree and in post-graduate degrees (see 2.6.2), due to both increasing academic demands on learning and the rapidly changing information landscape:

A:The information world is just changing so quickly and so rapidly that when you did a course, say two years ago, it’s all changed since then.

G: That’s one of the challenges, I think, too. You only get them at first-year, and you don’t get to revisit with the changes that are happening in the libraries and what you have access to. The students miss that unless they are curious enough to work it out for themselves, which isn’t that many of the students.

H:I taught that 4th year group for the first time this year. No-one knew about subject guides; hardly any of them knew about [Library Search] because those things had happened in the interim since they were taught in the second year. So they obviously hadn't been going and exploring and using the library website.

Although most librarians were assigned to work with specific subjects, many were not discipline specialists. The amount of time they could direct to exploring one subject or discipline depended on the size of the library and staffing. Some librarians were overseeing several subjects at once, while others were assigned to a specific discipline. Most librarians felt they could direct students towards databases and resources relevant to the discipline, but may not have been familiar with prominent authors or content knowledge. At one institution, one

librarian who had completed a degree in the discipline she was overseeing indicated the value of being familiar with the content when supporting students from that discipline.

D: If we can actually get them into a lecture the first thing I do is a hard sell - I market and I sell hard to students because we're lucky we've got Management, money, jobs. And I've got an undergraduate business degree and [librarian] has got some background so we are totally matched for our audience.

At another institution, two librarians had been working with the same discipline for a number of years and indicated that they had become familiar with the resources over time through extended collaboration with academics. They felt they could engage with students for both IL development and discipline-specific evaluation of sources.

A: when you work in a highly specialised area like this. I've got this theory that you learn it by osmosis because that is what you're dealing with all the time. You know the names of the people within the specialties; you know the key academics writing within the various areas of the specialist discipline and I think this is essential especially when you are giving guidance to students with the direction of their accessing of the information.

Consistent with the literature (see 2.6.3), NZ university librarians had the most success when collaborating with academics to embed IL development. They emphasised the importance of building a relationship with an academic instructor who actively sought to integrate IL development into the curriculum:

A: I’ve built that relationship up with [discipline] ever since I have been here so that has made a difference … I suppose acceptance of my role, and building that bridge between academics and myself, but then it makes it a lot easier when you say ‘look, this problem, this is what I think you can do’ and they go ‘yeah, let’s do it’.

C1: Sometimes it can literally take years to [build a relationship], you know, over cups of coffee in the staffroom, in conversations with other people, and selling you in front of other people.

C2: We are really aware of the need for collaboration and the need to get something in place within a structure that moves slightly faster than a glacial level … We’ve got people like [one particular academic] who are hooking in with us and making use of us and the students are benefitting. She’s not in a huge amount of company; we’re not fighting people like her off with a stick!

Most librarians had had the most success embedding IL into structured, cohort- based professional programmes, for example, law, engineering, and particularly, health programmes. They recognised that cohort-based courses provide an advantage for building skills over the years, allowing opportunities to extend the development of, rather than repeat, key IL competencies:

A: You’ve got that advantage of it being the same group going through, so you know what they have done; whereas in other groups, in Arts, for example, they might have already had five tutorials with a different librarian. For them it’s just another tutorial or the same thing. They don’t see it’s another discipline area, different resources. So it must be so much harder, I think, in those sorts of disciplines.

They also recognised the value of team-teaching with the academics, and the academics’ involvement and presence at the library sessions:

A: Some of the lectures, you were kind of co-teaching with the lecturer. The lecturer was there, you were there. The lecturer talked about the academic side of stuff and you talked about other things, so you were kind of seen as the same when you were presenting and that think that made a huge difference … you weren’t separate.

Most had also experienced the loss of key initiatives when instructors active in promoting IL development left the university or programme, or when courses were restructured. Some had also experienced instances where initiatives to embed IL had not been successful:

B: It just kind of died off with [discipline] and I would say we never got the match correct about what we were teaching and what they wanted. We were not all talking the same language even though I thought we were.