Information Literacy: An International State of the Art

B. IL Products for Users

1. 
   Know how materials for community centers, school, public libraries, special, university, and governments
   

The main libraries have printed materials on how to use general and specific information resources. This is probably one of the areas where there is more activity in the different types of libraries. Institutions, usually, at least those with certain budget, create manuals, flyers and other media to help users to get acquainted with information resources and to learn how to use and benefit from them; i.e., the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, 2006) has electronic documents available in their websites, manuals and tutorials on how to use catalogues, databases and other information services. There is also this kind of activity at government institutions; the Mexican statistics agency, INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Geografia e Informatica), has produced good guides to use the information that it produces (www.inegi.org.mx). Ministries from the major countries also have good guiding materials to teach users on how to consult their website and other resources. The Chilean government published a web site development guide called “Guía Web 1.0”; the aim of this document is to make websites more efficient, reliable and user friendly, i.e. it offers five checklists on ease of use, indexation, accessibility, speed of information retrieval and cyberspace presence of the site (Saavedra, 2004). Another Mexican institution, IFAI (Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información Pública), offers practical guides for the citizen to exercise his or her right to access public information (IFAI, n.d.).

2. 
   Library tours (General, specific library areas/services)
   

There are some libraries, those with a better technology base, that have produced multimedia library tours or videos. Examples are the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (Lau, 2001), Universidad Veracruzana (Guadarrama & Longgi, 2006), Universidad del Valle de México (Moreno & Jiménez, 2005) and UNAM (Valdés, 1995; Rovalo, 2004). The hypermedia programs have been produced mainly in CD-ROMs to help new students to get acquainted with library services, but some others are available on the web, where the Universidad de Colima has a good lead (www.ucol.mx).

3. 
   Tutorials on how to use specific information resources (Electronic resources, printed media, Internet, other)
   

Some leading academic libraries have worked in tutorials for their users, again, to show how to use databases, how to navigate in Internet. An example is the work done at Universidad Veracruzana, with a web-based resource to guide users on how to use electronic serials, language translators and the OPAC (Mendoza, 2005). Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez developed a multimedia program to teach undergraduates on how to benefit from the OPAC. The General Department of Public Libraries in Mexico has also created videos to train. Instituto Latino-americano para la Comunicación Educativa (ILCE), a multimedia education think-tank, has also videos for user information training (ILCE, 2006). The INEGI has produced web-based tutorials to use their cartographic resources too (INEGI, 2006). It is assumed that leading universities with good technology resources from the rest of Latin America have some learning tutorials for their users, such as the Virtual Training for users developed by Gloria Tinjacá and Luz María Cabarcas (2007) at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, in Colombia.

4. 
   Workshop/Hands on experiences (For students, faculty, citizens, other users)
   

This kind of information literacy is well developed in major library organizations, like those at UNAM (Valdéz, Solís, & Ramírez. 2006; Rovalo, 2004), UDLA (2006) ITESM (2005), ITESO (Toledano, 2006), Universidad de Antioquia (UDEA, 2005), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Rengifo, Ada), and Universidad Católica Del Norte (UCN, 2006), among others. Most of them offer workshops for their different types of users. The UACJ was an organization early to offer regular hands on experiences to undergraduates and faculty. The faculty workshop has the catchy name MADRID (Manejo de Recursos Informativos para Docentes), a course offered at least twice a year (Mears, 2002). Professors have the motivation to attend the workshop because it is part of their academic training curricula. The student version was optional in the early start and later on it became compulsory. A special version of the workshops is devoted to graduate students. Chile has a number of similar experiences; a course for faculty at the Universidad de Antofagasta (Peragallo & Cortés, 2004), a course for students and professors at the Universidad de Concepción (González & Muñoz, 2004), and the different projects done at the Universidad Católica del Maule (Alarcón & Rojas, 2004), which seek to develop the IL of students and faculty, to build connections between faculty and librarians and to build learning communities with a focus in the library.

Some of these workshops are multi-level; they deal with the very basics of information literacy up to the more complex ethical considerations on information use. Some others, like that of ITESO, are supplied on professors’ request for the students to get acquainted with specific databases or information services. The Universidad de Puerto Rico Bayamon has been offering the Infonexus (Maldonado, 2003) program for three years: an IL workshop array for students, faculty, university staff and extended community (public and private educational institutions).

5. 
   Credit courses
   

Some universities are beginning to offer information credit literacy courses, in some cases, as full subject; that is the case of Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, where an introductory course on information culture has been attached in the university’s curricula (Hermosillo, Méndez & Ostrovskaya, 2004). At the ITESM, all freshmen and new faculty are directed to an introductory course on their library’s information services (ITESM, 2005; Arriaga, et. al., 2003). A similar action has been worked at UACJ (Lau, 2001). One of the most widespread experiences is the credit distance course required to first year students at the Clavijero Consortium of Higher Education in Veracruz (Lau, J. 2006); the web-based course has been made a compulsory subject by 29 universities and polytechnics. Despite this progress, there is a great deal of work to be done, so that information literacy becomes part of the curricula at the different levels of education. Librarians have been promoting information literacy at their institutions, but most of them still need to be heard. Despite IL has not become a credit course at the UNAM, the contributions of the Library Direction on IL and lifelong learning, described by María de Lourdes Rovalo (2004), must be mentioned as a token of the efforts being done.