When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Information Literacy: More Necessary and More Rare Than Ever
Posted on June 10, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Sam Berry-Sullivan
I will have been a librarian for eight years by September 2025, and in that time I have worked at three academic libraries. At two of those three institutions, I was asked to introduce students to resources available at the library, how to search for information in relevant databases, and how to then cite the information they found in APA format. At my first and current libraries, instruction sessions are the ubiquitous “one-shot” format. This means that, as the lone librarian liaising with our most highly enrolled programs, I am lucky to meet each student once. Only one of these institutions offered three-part library instruction in which each session built on the knowledge from the session before, starting with a basic introduction to the library and ending with students practicing information evaluation techniques on a handful of different source types. Students practiced building complex searches and learned why it’s critical to credit their sources, and I was able to leave the third session confident that they could differentiate between an article from a magazine versus one from a scholarly journal, and understand when each source might be appropriate to use.
Do enough librarians get the opportunity to teach these invaluable concepts? Do enough librarians get the chance to work with students for more than one class period, to co-teach a research methods course, or to consult on information literacy instruction? One-shot style instruction has been the norm in academic librarianship for decades, and it has been extensively written about as an obstacle to meaningful teaching and skill development for students. Beyond students, librarians feel the impact of conducting sessions they know aren’t truly optimized for learning, and this feeling of redundancy or uselessness can contribute to burnout. With only an hour to work with students, I can just barely cover our website, the catalog, a few databases, and our citation LibGuide. After that, I hope they are getting some information literacy training in their other courses, even if it isn’t explicit. However, I cringe as I recall a faculty member telling me she’s had multiple nursing students cite information from the websites of Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. It is clear to me that the students who cited that information were not applying the information literacy skills that would have allowed them to evaluate those websites and conclude they do not contain reliable, credible information that would be useful in a scholarly setting.
In this era of extreme political polarity—characterized by conspiracy theories posing as “news”, a marked increase in violence towards minoritized groups, of the demonization of higher education, and citizens so inundated with mis/information they put their lives and those of others at risk (see: ivermectin as COVID-19 treatment; our current HHS Secretary’s many alarming, unsupported healthcare stances)—working with your library and faculty colleagues to teach students information literacy and evaluation skills is more critical than ever.
How do we ensure that students are getting the information literacy and evaluation instruction they need?
- Don’t reinvent the wheel! If you don’t have time to create an information literacy curriculum from scratch, find and adapt information literacy OER, from worksheets to whole courses. obligation to do so again and to become oases of knowledge, resources, and compassion for our communities, particularly our undocumented, international, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ students, faculty, and their families.
- Get to know the folks in charge of assessment at your institution. See if you can sit in on a departmental meeting or simply ask where you might find data on information literacy and evaluation skills at your institution. If that data doesn’t, collaborate to collect it!
- When answering reference questions or performing individual research sessions, ask students a few short, pre-determined questions assessing their information literacy and evaluation skills, and keep a record of their responses. Recording their majors/programs and their year will add more context to this data which can be presented to your library colleagues for discussion or to the faculty within your liaison department.
- Create modules with information literacy and evaluation exercises. Work with program chairs to embed this material across the program, so students get multiple opportunities to learn and build on previous knowledge.
- Work with instructors in your liaison department to see where existing materials and assignments can be modified to include information literacy and evaluation skill building. Seek buy-in from instructors you have rapport with and suggest piloting this work in a few sections of a course. Collect data throughout the semester on the courses with information literacy added compared to a section where it wasn’t added, and you have the foundations of a research paper on your hands!
- Collaborate with the offices of student life or programming on your campuses to create a game out of information literacy knowledge that the library can co-host. The opportunity for snacks and possibly participation points will draw students who might otherwise not have come to a session of their own accord.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel! If you don’t have time to create an information literacy curriculum from scratch, find and adapt information literacy OER, from worksheets to whole courses.
About the author:
Sam Berry-Sullivan is a white, nonbinary, neurodivergent academic librarian who leverages their privilege and unique experience of the world to advocate for diversity and equity in librarianship, higher education, and health sciences, for which Sam is subject liaison.
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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.