Giving Up the Good Fight?: Librarians and Information Literacy

An interview with Amber Willenborg and Robert Detmering

Posted on July 17, 2024 in Blog Posts

Authors:

Daniel PfeifferAmber WillenborgRob Detmering
A librarian who is burnt out from teaching information literacy

“Information literacy” has become a watchword for librarians—not merely a pedagogical aim but a moral obligation in a digital and political landscape riddled with misinformation. The clear necessity of information literacy in society belies a more difficult question: Should librarians be the ones to take on the full weight of this mantle? This is not merely a theoretical question but one that opens up challenging and important conversations about the material resources and professional opportunities librarians actually have to effect this change in academic settings.

This contention stands at the heart of a new paper by Amber Willenborg and Robert Detmering, librarians at the University of Louisville, to be published in College & Research Libraries (2025). The title of their piece—“‘I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us’: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age”—offers one provocative response, but their interviews with 20, full-time academic librarians reveal a range of opinions, experiences, and strategies that deserves close appreciation.

To learn more about their findings and perspectives, we interviewed Willenborg and Detmering, touching on professional angst, the one-shot session, and generative AI literacy. The interview is meant to be read alongside their paper, which offers far more detail about individual librarian responses to these issues and makes for an engaging read. View their article.

I want to begin by asking you to contextualize the provocative quote in the title of your piece, “I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us.” Information literacy was advanced as a way of empowering people as critical thinkers and digital citizens, so why has it created so much—to use your term—”professional angst”?

Instruction librarians often experience a tension between their sense of professional and moral obligation to advance information literacy and the practical realities of their working conditions. At many institutions, even in places where they are highly respected, librarians are limited by the standard model of one-shot instruction, the amount of time they can dedicate to information literacy initiatives, and the expectations of disciplinary teaching faculty. Against this backdrop, you have this giant social and political problem of misinformation, which, in theory, librarians ought to be at the forefront of addressing but which feels overwhelming and mismatched to current instructional models.

This is where the professional angst comes in: seeing ourselves as playing a key role in creating an informed citizenry and helping solve the crisis of misinformation but being constrained by our material conditions and seeing no one else stepping up to take charge. We’ve attended conferences and professional development events just this year where librarians were constantly lamenting the limitations of the one-shot and wishing for more substantial integration into the curriculum, but these same concerns have been voiced for decades, even as some librarians have found ways to work around the limitations through stand-alone, credit-bearing courses, online toolkits, and other strategies. So, librarians are certainly doing great work, but the angst remains, in part because the rhetoric surrounding information literacy presents an ambitious agenda that almost certainly can’t be realized in the current professional context, at least by librarians working in relative isolation.

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Much of your piece tries to square the aspirations of information literacy instruction with the material limits librarians face in trying to enact this education. What are the material conditions inhibiting information literacy instruction? What are some instructional practices that aren’t working?

Librarians we spoke with for this study described both contextual and personal challenges that prevent them from providing truly meaningful instruction around misinformation.

Unsurprisingly, the contextual limitations all exist because the one-shot model of instruction is the standard in academia. Librarians don’t have time in a single 50- or 75-minute session to have deep conversations with students about misinformation and evaluation. We are often at the mercy of faculty who have expectations of what a one-shot session should cover, and straying from those expectations could harm instructional relationships. And while librarians wish they could spend more time on big conversations around misinformation, they also feel obligated to meet students’ immediate needs. If a class is sitting in front of you because they have a research assignment that requires the use of scholarly sources, are you going to not teach about library databases and scholarship, instead spend the hour discussing fake news, and send them on their way? We have to prepare students for their here and now as college learners, while also considering their future as informed citizens in a society with a large-scale misinformation problem. The one-shot model doesn’t leave much room for those two missions to co-exist.

Getting back to the idea of professional angst, librarians also experience personal challenges related to addressing information in the classroom. They are overwhelmed by this huge misinformation problem and experience anxiety and distress around their role in combating the issue, while also not feeling quite like experts on misinformation but still feeling obligated to address it. Librarians also have to deal with the fact that misinformation conversations are inherently political, and there’s always the possibility of pushback from students. Some librarians even described experiencing politically charged confrontations in the classroom that have scared them away from addressing misinformation.

As far as what instructional practices aren’t working, the issue is not so much the practices themselves but rather that their impact is limited. Librarians are doing great work designing instruction sessions, leading workshops, and creating online tutorials and guides all around misinformation, but their level of influence isn’t sufficient to meet the broader goals of the information literacy movement. What’s not working more generally, especially if we have lofty goals around saving the world from misinformation, is the one-shot model. That’s not to say it doesn’t have value—if our goal is to teach students how to be successful researchers in the context of a university and a particular assignment, we are certainly doing our job and making an impact. But if our aspirations are greater, as they appear to be for many librarians taking up the mantle of misinformation, the one-shot model is obviously not the avenue for achieving our goals.

From your interviews, you learned of several different strategies and institutional arrangements some librarians have used to overcome these instructional hurdles. Are there any that seem particularly promising to you?

Several of the librarians we talked to are either teaching their own credit-bearing courses or mentioning how great it would be if they could teach a semester-long course. Teaching full courses rather than one-shots pushes past some of those contextual restraints: time, faculty expectations, and student needs. Librarians are able to dedicate a whole semester to teaching students about the information ecosystem and evaluation, and they can develop deeper relationships with students that allow more comfortability and trust when having conversations that may be somewhat political. Obviously, credit-bearing courses aren’t a perfect solution, but it’s a promising direction for thinking about moving information literacy forward and integrating it more fully into the curriculum.

Collaboration is another strategy that seems promising. Librarians struggle with feeling alone in their information literacy work while also feeling like they’ve taken up the mantle on a topic they aren’t experts on. Collaboration with disciplines like psychology, sociology, and journalism that approach misinformation from a different angle than librarians could help us develop a more complex view of misinformation.

Librarians tend to see the problem as an information literacy problem because that’s our background. We think that if you just teach someone to identify the signs of fake news, they won’t be susceptible to misinformation. But researchers from other disciplines know that there are so many more psychological and emotional dimensions to why people fall victim to misinformation. We should be closely collaborating with these other disciplines to strategize best practices for teaching students about misinformation and integrating misinformation education into the curriculum in a fundamental way.

Given the constraints of the one-shot model and other material conditions, your article leads readers to the far more difficult question: Should librarians save us? Incidentally, this dilemma cropped up in the most recent issue of Journal of Information Literacy, and one set of authors took the path of refusal, arguing that librarians should refocus on teaching students “how to library.” You touch briefly on the trade-offs, so I was wondering if you could expand on the affordances that saying no to this question would allow. Equally important, how would this refashion librarians’ professional self-image, which seems to be at stake in this issue?

The reality of the situation is that neither of these extreme paths is really doable. Our recommendation in the article that librarians completely blow up instruction as we know it and break free from our material conditions through systemic changes, like reimagining information literacy programs and developing information literacy as an academic discipline, is unlikely to happen.

But we also don’t believe we can bury our heads in the sand and insist on a potentially reductive approach of only teaching students “how to library,” even if it were to incorporate a broader and more critical view of libraries and academia. This would be akin to some current teaching faculty who are simply refusing to acknowledge artificial intelligence in their classrooms, even though students are already using it and want to learn more about it. The world goes on around us outside the library, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t.

There has to be a middle ground between the overwhelming pressure librarians put on themselves to be at the forefront of everything information literacy and the refusal to play any role outside the walls of our libraries. We talk in our paper about how the current state of information literacy instruction isn’t something we should be ashamed of—librarians do have an impact on students in the one-shot sessions they teach. Choosing to focus our energy on the most immediate need of students, often to complete a college research assignment, makes total sense.

But it’s still important for librarians to stay up to date on the latest trends in misinformation, generative artificial intelligence, and whatever comes next in relation to information literacy to provide support to students and faculty on these topics. Not because we need to be the experts or lead the charge or be seen as important, but because topics like these should always be informing our work and shaping how we teach students to “library.”

How all of this affects the professional self-image of librarians is difficult to say. On the one hand, we have librarians trying to take on the ambitious and perhaps impossible agenda of information literacy on a broad scale, despite the very real limitations of their material conditions. On the other hand, we now have some voices calling on librarians to “refuse the impossibility of this work” and just talk about the library. To us, both viewpoints seem a bit extreme and unnecessarily self-sacrificing. We believe the path forward is not to take on more than we can handle, nor is it to retreat inward. Instead, we need to reach outward by working with experts in other disciplines and developing different, more collaborative instructional models. Collaboration is one of our strengths and should be foundational for a positive self-image.

For those librarians who want to keep up the good fight, what conversations do they need to begin having with their stakeholders and with each other? Do you think that the disruption of AI in higher ed, and the concomitant concern for AI literacy, provides a good vehicle for advocating for these changes, or does it simply compound the problems librarians are already facing?

AI could provide a prime example for a path forward for librarians advocating for their voice in these big conversations, but it really depends how we approach the AI conversation. An issue with the misinformation movement is that it seems like librarians want to be in charge—or at the very least feel that they have to be in charge—because no one else is stepping up. Librarians should learn all they can (or have the capacity for) about AI literacy and be ready to have informed conversations with faculty on the topic, but is it our role to chair the campus AI committee or to radically update library instruction to focus extensively on AI? Obviously, it depends on institutional context, but taking full ownership of AI literacy may not make sense for librarians. 

When it comes to big topics like misinformation and artificial intelligence, librarians need to be able to clearly articulate their role and what the library can offer to support students and faculty in these areas. Artificial intelligence and AI literacy will obviously play a role in our conversations with faculty and other stakeholders because our teaching should be responding to students’ current information environment, whether our focus is on misinformation, “how to library,” or something else.

That said, we probably need to move away from seeing every change or disruption as a crisis that we’re responsible for solving. We can’t do everything, so we need to figure out what our priorities are and build instructional approaches tailored to those priorities with realistic and achievable goals.

📄 Read Willenborg and Detmering’s full article.

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