Effective Collaboration for Campus-wide Information Literacy:
The Blended Librarian’s Perspective on How To Make It Work

An ACRL/TLT Group Online Workshop

Two 90 minute sessions April 5 and 12, 2007 at 1 pm Eastern Daylight Time

Session Links and Resources: click here

Workshop Goal:  To help participants identify techniques and tools that will enable academic librarians, faculty members, information technologists, instructional design professionals, et al. to discover or develop and implement new approaches for collaboration, to achieve maximum integration of the library into the teaching and learning process throughout their institutions. To help guide such collaborative efforts toward library, curricular, and other related institutional goals - especially those of advancing information literacy.

Workshop Description:  There is an extensive body of literature on information literacy and the importance of librarian-faculty collaboration in achieving it. The workshop will bring a new perspective on information literacy and collaboration through a conceptual framework the workshop leaders refer to as "Blended Librarianship."

External forces threaten to marginalize the role of the academic library: these forces increase the need for "information literacy" knowledge and skills among students, faculty, and others whose professions require their effective use of new information resources (e.g., growing emphasis on "undergraduate research" projects). Consequently, it is essential to further the librarians' integration into the teaching and learning process and the ability of faculty and other academic professionals to work collegially with librarians.  

A blended librarian is one who combines traditional library and information technology skills with instructional design and technology skills as well as knowledge of collections of instructional resources and current trends in developing and distributing instructional resources. The blended librarian uses this combination, along with a heightened emphasis on pedagogy, to collaborate with faculty, information technologists, and instructional technologists/designers on the design of information literacy that is tightly integrated into the individual instructor’s courses and with broader programmatic curricular goals. 

Participants will draw on the experiences of the workshop leaders and other academic professionals in exploring new forms of collaboration. The instructors will engage their librarian and non-library faculty, administrative, and information technologist colleagues in seeking innovative ways (including the use of newly available tools that support collaborative work and related communication) to use collaboration to further campus-wide information literacy initiatives.  

The workshop will address the following issues:

·      What are the new kinds of services and resources that faculty and students need for which librarians are likely to be among the best-qualified to provide?  E.g., helping faculty find, evaluate the quality of information about, and select instructional resources that are well-matched with specific instructional needs, goals?  Most faculty are overwhelmed with the new challenge of "keeping on top" of attractive instructional resources that are likely to be relevant to their own courses.  Most students are naïve about what can and cannot be done via the Web.

·      What is blended librarianship, why is it important, and what are the principles that form its structure?

·      Instructional design and technology principles for academic librarians: what do we need to know and how can we integrate these skills into our own?  What do such librarians need to learn about pedagogy, professional development, etc.?

·      How is courseware becoming an essential technology for collaboration and the integration of library resources into the teaching and learning process?

·      What are the complementary relationships between the library’s electronic resources (including informational or learning objects) and what faculty are doing in the classroom – and how can we take advantage to facilitate information literacy and collaboration?

·      How can faculty members and librarians (and others) collaborate most effectively to influence institutional policy to facilitate the integration of information literacy more widely and thoroughly into the curriculum?  

For more information, visit the Blended Librarians Website at http://blendedlibrarian.org  

One Columbia Avenue,
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912
Phone: 301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110  

To talk about our work
or our organization
contact:  Sally Gilbert