Information Literacy: An International State of the Art

B. IL Products for Users
Information literacy education in higher education
The state of information education (ILE) from 1997 – 2002 has been extensively reviewed in a paper by De Jager and Nassimbeni (2002). The survey showed that there were many IL interventions taking place. It was found that librarians were aware of the pedagogical desirability of the integrated approach, but were finding it difficult to make inroads into the academic curriculum.
The current position is that most institutions offer library orientation courses in addition to ad hoc interventions when requested by students or academics. Examples include training on the OPAC, electronic databases and bibliographic referencing. There has been demonstrable progress towards the integration of IL modules into the academic curriculum at more institutions. While the majority of courses are still generic and standalone, some are credit-bearing, there is now evidence of a greater number of IL modules embedded into various curricula with their own assessment components. Assessment of student performance uses a range of methods from questionnaires and assignments to portfolios of work. An information literacy workshop for academic librarians in 2004 agreed that the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) be asked to accept the ACRL Standards for use in South Africa, with the addition of the final CAUL standard relating to lifelong learning as a 6^th standard. This has not transpired yet as there have been delays in setting up the structures to generate standards for the LIS community. SAQA has overall responsibility for quality assurance in support of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). The NQF is a framework on which standards and qualifications agreed to by the relevant education and training sectors throughout the country are registered.
Most institutions have a librarian whose primary responsibility is ILE; very often supported by subject librarians who offer training in their specific fields or disciplines. Some of the training is delivered in classrooms/computer laboratories while some in offered virtually through platforms such as Web-CT. A training librarian makes the point, however, that at her institution they are unable to offer an online course as many of their students come “from rural areas, farms and townships where there are no libraries and computers”. In some institutions, for example at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town, the library and the library school cooperate in the design and delivery of a credit-bearing course for first year students.
Many of the generic courses offered by the libraries are accessible from their websites. Examples include:
Cape Peninsula University of Technology

http://www.cput.ac.za/library/infoLit/index.html an information skills general training course.

Rhodes University

http://www.ru.ac.za/library/infolit/ a general skills training course.

University of Cape Town

http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/Training/lit/infoskills.htm. The information literacy website on the UCT Library’s website, offering an information skills corner with a variety of guides.

University of Johannesburg

http://general.uj.ac.za/library/lidi/ujlic/Trainingframe.htm. This is the information literacy section on the University of Johannesburg’s library website.

University of South Africa

http://www.unisa.ac.za/. There is a special section under Instruction on the Unisa website, describing the training courses.

University of Stellenbosch

http://www.lib.sun.ac.za/Library/eng/help/IG_Programme/Opleiding/Training_Indexhtml a catalogue of training course on offer by the Library.

http://www.sun.ac.za/library/eng/help/Viewlets/menu.htm. Online training modules on topics such as the OPAC and various databases:

http://www.lib.sun.ac.za/Library/eng/help/Database_Tutorials/PubMed/Pubmed_viewlet_swf.htm. A tutorial on how to use PubMed

University of the Free State

http://www.uovs.ac.za/support/library/ilk/index.htm a credit bearing course for first year students at the University of the Free State

University of the Western Cape

The website of the library at the University of the Western Cape offers online user guides on how to search the OPAC and electronic resources. The website has a section for information literacy at http://www.uwc.ac.za/library/ from which an online information literacy module is accessible: http://www.uwc.ac.za/library/infolit/infolit%20new/start.html

A number of published manuals and workbooks have been produced by the Gold Fields Library and Information Centre of Technikon SA, now merged with UNISA. These manuals and workbooks by Sandra Erasmus provide the framework for students’ information literacy portfolios.
School libraries (contribution by Sandy Zinn)

A clear and common understanding of information literacy still needs to be addressed amongst school librarians in South Africa. Research into information literacy at the school level in South Africa has been limited. The outcomes based curriculum has created enormous opportunities to engage with information literacy skills. The SAQA Act lists seven critical and five developmental outcomes which embody the kind of learner who will exit the schooling system. Of these critical outcomes the ones which relate to research skills (collect, analyse, organise and critically evaluate information overlap with information literacy skills. Both the Revised Curriculum Statement (May 2002) and the existing Curriculum 2005 (which provide the framework for curriculum delivery) offer opportunities to develop information literacy skills within the learning areas. However, there is a need for a separate statement of information literacy outcomes or guidelines.

The Education Library and Technology Services of the provincial Department of Education of KwaZulu Natal has produced a useful template for schools wishing to create a whole school information literacy policy. It is available at

http://www.kzneducation.gov.za/elits/Publications.htm.

Public libraries

Very little has been done yet in public libraries, and very little, therefore, written about it. In the last couple of years, however, there has been notable progress in this field. Two research dissertations were awarded for investigations into information literacy in public libraries (Hart, 2005; Van der Walt, 2005). A recent report describes an information literacy education project with 30 public librarians in Mpumalanga province. It is intended that this pilot project, which will be completed early in 2007will, extend to other public libraries in the province (http://www.ched.uct.ac.za/cil/dils/Information literacy campaign.pdf.

Organisations

The Library and Information Association of South Africa is the lead body promoting and providing continuing professional development of library and information workers in South Africa (http://www.liasa.org.za/ ). One of its five policy statements incorporates the goal of information literacy for all in conjunction with lifelong learning (http://www.liasa.org.za/policies/policies.php). The act of Parliament that brought into being the National Library of South Africa by amalgamating the South African Library in Cape Town and the State Library in Pretoria lists the promotion of information awareness and information literacy as one of the functions of the national library (South Africa 1998).

Training of the trainers
LIASA has since 2002 facilitated a number of workshops and training courses to equip librarians with an understanding of the role of IL in student learning and to provide them with guidance on curriculum design, teaching and assessment methods.

In addition, individual libraries are encouraging their librarians to attend professional development courses such as developments in web technology, new electronic products and communication tools, thus enhancing their own information literacy capacity. CICD. Of the library schools, the Department of Library and Information Science at the University of the Western Cape offers a compulsory module on information literacy in the third year of the four-year undergraduate degree.