11th National Library Technicians Conference

Information literacy, online learning and the library of the future

Ellen Ennever University of Tasmania

Abstract
This paper intends to look at promotion of information literacy as an area of expansion for libraries, and library workers, in the future. Libraries have a unique opportunity to help people to adapt to the increasing pace and scope of change in the information age, and hold a position of trust in the community. New online learning technologies could open up the possibility of libraries providing courses in information retrieval and interpretation, increasing the community level of information literacy.

This avenue of service provision would provide staff development and financial incentives to libraries around the nation. As institutions they are seen as working objectively for public good and this would be a distinct advantage in marketing information literacy to the community. Library staff possess significant skills in the use of new technologies and the provision of online learning courses would merely extend career paths for staff in areas that libraries already address, through face-to-face services to clients. Online course delivery would be an adjunct to the service mission of libraries, tapping into the burgeoning adult education marketplace and enhancing the general level of information literacy around the nation. The aim of this paper is to alert library staff to the services that can be offered through new technologies and to show them that libraries have diverse options available to them in future.

Introduction
I recall that when I commenced my Library Technicians Certificate course in Sydney in the early 1980s personal computers were just beginning to make their presence felt in the workplace and the home. They were incredibly slow and primitive machines by todays standards, with word processing their main advantage over the electric typewriter, but even so their potential was obvious. As more powerful and sophisticated software and hardware systems for computers evolved the awesome pace of change accelerated. The chief agent of the most revolutionary alterations in the way we all think of technology and information has been the birth and incredible development of the World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) and the concomitant growth of the Internet.

This growth has challenged notions people hold about the nature of literacy. We now speak of information literacy as a key skill for those who would cope with the 21st century. Information is now a global, valuable commodity. Similarly notions of how we can access information have changed. Libraries are no longer the guardians of information, and library staff no longer gatekeepers. People can learn as much or more about a topic on their computer at home than they can from consulting one or two books on the topic at their local library. Learning online is now a major feature of learning across the lifespan. Courses in handling the hardware and software of access to information have burgeoned across the education spectrum, from self-improvement to Degree level, but courses in the effective searching, retrieval and use of information are less widespread.

In todays paper I wish to concentrate upon the concept of information literacy and how libraries can promote its development in the general community. This development will necessitate library staff acquiring new skills, and perhaps even require a paradigm shift in the way libraries view their patrons and their needs, because the very nature of information itself is changing rapidly, as are notions of what it takes to be "literate" in the 21st century. The effective retrieval and interpretation of information will, I believe, assume far more importance than ever before and I also believe that libraries are uniquely well placed to deliver online courses to enhance information literacy in all age groups, at all social levels.

Information literacy: in search of definiiton
When can we say someone is "information literate"? What qualities of person and of mind define this abstract notion? It seems to have emerged as a distinct branch of the broader literacy debate in the last twenty years, with a marked acceleration in research and consideration of its dimensions in the 1990s (Bruce, 2000a). A useful exercise is to look at conference papers and research reports involving the Information Literacy and RAISS groups of ALIA, and the journal Australian Academic and Research Libraries (AARL) over the past nine years to gain a nutshell perspective on the debates over information literacy. In my current area of study, Adult and Vocational Education information literacy has perhaps a longer history in the Discourse Analysis school of theorists, from Foucault through Fairclough, Halliday and Gee. In Discourse Analysis the way we understand the world as presented to us in print, speech, sight and sound is mediated by how we interpret the wider world we experience, resulting in multiple literacies. I wont bore you all with the details here! It will suffice to say that in this tradition information literacy is taken in its broadest sense: if we experience something and make sense of it, then we can be called information literate.

Is this a useful definition for libraries, or the wider community? No. It is useful for describing what might be called commonsense literacies, but current debate is heading towards prescriptive definition that takes into account the technology of information retrieval and the almost limitless amounts of information that the Internet can deliver. In 1990 MIT estimated that by 2000 the worlds knowledge base would double every eleven hours (Imel, 1990). This estimate was made when the web was in its infancy and seems extremely conservative if you take into consideration the growth of domains and indexed pages on the internet. A web survey by Netcraft in September 1999 found 9.5 million websites, an increase of 300% over 1998 (S E O Technologies, 2000) and in its State of the Web 2000 report the U S Internet Council quotes figures that indicated the web contained 1 billion indexable pages in January 2000 and by June 2000 this figure had increased to 2 billion, showing that the web doubled in size in six months. The challenge of defining and nurturing information literacy is growing larger and more complex every day.

Libraries have historically been major sources for the dissemination of information and have also been extremely quick to see the possibilities of new technologies in the delivery of information. They have a vested interest in discovering the nature of information literacy to help them assist clients effectively. It is no coincidence that the growth of interest in information literacy neatly parallels the development of the web and that libraries have been heavily involved in attempting to evolve working definitions of information literacy, in conjunction with other educational, social and cultural institutions. Librarians have been initiators of...new developments [in information literacy] and the profession has an intimate awareness of the information environment and critical abilities to communicate and work with information users (Bruce, 2000b, p 217).

The efforts of the profession have borne some fruit in the last two years with the U S approving "Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education" in January 2000. A subsequent Australian workshop at the University of South Australia, involving the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), reviewed these standards and issued the first revised Australian version in October 2000. I will not go into exhaustive detail here, but rather highlight the seven major standards:

1. The information literate person recognises the need for information and determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
2. The information literate person accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
3. The information literate person evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into their knowledge base and value system.
4. The information literate person classifies, stores, manipulates and redrafts information collected or generated.
5. The information literate person expands, reframes or creates new knowledge by integrating prior knowledge and new understandings individually or as the member of a group.
6. The information literate person understands cultural, economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically, legally and respectfully.
7. The information literate person recognises that lifelong learning and participative citizenship requires information literacy. (AARL, vol 32, no 1, pp 16-25)

The standards described above are recognisably aimed at those engaged in higher education, but they certainly have wider relevance. Information literacy research is moving beyond the academic application of the notion to look at how people cope with information literacy in the workplace and in the wider community (Bruce, 2000a; Bruce, 2000b; Dellit, 2000). ALIA has acknowledged this broader framework in the Statement on Information Literacy for All Australians, formulated by the Information Literacy Special Interest Group (INFOLIT), which states that:

A thriving national and global culture, economy and democracy will be best advanced by people able to recognise their need for information, and identify, locate, access, evaluate and apply the needed information.

Information literacy is a prerequisite for:

• participative citizenship;
• social inclusion;
• the creation of new knowledge;
• personal empowerment; and,
• learning for life. (INFOLIT, ALIA; 2001)

The above definition of the concept of information literacy is as brief and clear as any definition is likely to get. It emphasises that empowerment is a key factor in achieving information literacy. It is in this context that I believe libraries and library staff have a vital role in the future, empowering individuals to achieve their optimum level of personal information literacy. How this may be accomplished I will address shortly. First, however, some wider issues involved information literacy need to be addressed.

The character of information literacy
I have said above that information is now a global commodity, and commodities dont often come into our lives without some obvious effects. Information of itself has no character, rather those who create, disseminate, retrieve, collect and interpret it assign information a value. This value can be defined in any number of ways; political, cultural, social and educational among them, and the value can range from irrelevant to life altering. People have always realised that some types of information had value, Intelligence gathering by sovereign nations would be an example, but with the current explosion of information on the Internet there seems to be a movement to expand notions of Intellectual Property and Proprietary rights to information. This means that some Websites will require that you subscribe, or register, to receive a password to access their material. I personally have accessed Websites that were freely available one month, passworded the next. Additionally, the web has a no editorial board. The information you receive is simply data, with no guarantees as to accuracy, currency or validity. This is at once a strength and a weakness. The strengths can be illustrated by such things as worldwide access to news services and homepages of organisations that speak direct to the public; the weaknesses are readily shown by the occasional rumours, viruses and inaccuracies that pervade the Web.

Access to information, and consequently the ability to enhance information literacy, is therefore a double-edged sword and should be treated with care and respect. A key concern for ALIA this year is information equity and access to information, with Dr Alan Bundy canvassing many of the issues facing librarians and library technicians in his Frontline article in the May 2001 issue of inCite. In the same issue John Levett argues that in the context of the access to information debate the:

wider questions of the quality, reliability, transparency, contamination, validity, [and] authenticity of information seem not to arise. These problems have assumed a much greater significance with the exponential growth of access to information, and the extreme difficulty of evaluation and validation attaching to information that comes to us via the World Wide Web. (Levett, 2001, p 10)

All these point should be seriously considered in promoting information literacy because libraries need to identify some sort of quality control mechanism in promoting information literacy. It is one thing to actively lobby for a wider public commitment to achieving higher information literacy benchmarks in the community, but libraries will have to "nail their colours to the mast", and quantify what constitutes low, medium and high levels of reliability in sources of information. Why do this? It is a small step from evaluation to censorship, from being a nurturing institution to a patronising one. It is a fine line but libraries and their staff will have to tread it in the future, if we expect to retain the trust of clients. I am advocating that libraries provide educational courses to promote information literacy, whatever their clientele. To do this, library staff will have to develop new assessment and evaluation skills and they will have to apply these skills as objectively as possible, in order to provide courses in information literacy that cater to a broad cross-section of society. If people can assess the quality of the information they are finding on any particular subject then the quality of web information itself is assessed.

The character of information literacy as a global concept is not within the scope of this paper. The passage above is designed to outline the larger issues informing debate on the topic and does not touch on the social, political and economic factors that mediate access to information, highlighted by the "digital divide". I believe the divide between those with ready access to sources of information and those who do not, the divide between having power and lacking it, between rich and poor, cannot be addressed with any justice here. It would need a far bigger paper! Libraries are better placed than nearly any other institution to address information literacy in the wider community and so highlight the nature of the divide and redress it to some extent. The character of information, and power, will change as the concept of what information is and how we access it changes, and in the final analysis the consumer will determine its character. Libraries can merely try to assist the ability of individuals to access and interpret information, a role that has not changed since antiquity.

Online learning: an overview
Online learning can be used to describe any computer mediated learning regime and includes elearning, computer based learning, intranets, synchronous and asynchronous learning. It has been in use since the 1980s but has developed rapidly in the last six years as the technology available to support it has become more sophisticated and reliable. But how did this journey begin? The internet began as ARPANET, a network of computers commissioned by the U S military in 1969 and it included twenty three computer nodes, or sites, incorporating U S and overseas based computer systems (Duggleby, 2000). The World Wide Web had a different genesis. The European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, in Switzerland, was finding communication between its various computer systems was inefficient and time consuming. In 1991 CERN developed hypertext to aid the exchange of information between their computer networks and the first Internet browsers using web hypertext were launched in 1993, shortly after the Internet reached the 1 million host mark. Since then the growth of the web has been phenomenal. The current number of users is thought to be between the 500 million to 707 million mark, with 6.4 million servers and 4.5 million sites (S E O Technologies, 2000; U S Internet Council, 2000). However, there is also a "hidden internet" consisting of unindexed documents, and images, on the web and no one really knows how large this is, it could amount to millions of items.

Size is impressive, but it is easy to see that such a large edifice cannot easily be searched effectively. Netcraft has done research that indicates 80 per cent of internet traffic finally ends up at 0.5 per cent of all URLs - about 15 thousand Websites (S E O Technologies, 2000), this represents a tiny fraction of the available Websites. New metadata and technological initiatives such as the Dublin Core and Internet2 projects are attempting to provide better access to the information on the web in a wider variety of formats, and also, hopefully, speed up the web as well. The technological journey is only just beginning for the web and the internet, but the platforms already in place do support a wide variety of formats and possibilities for online delivery of learning.

What learning formats are most common? A basic divide is whether the learning system is synchronous or asynchronous. Examples of synchronous environments are: Chat rooms, satellite video/ audio hookups, and web based whiteboards (such as eBeam). Asynchronous environments include: Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), emails, and downloaded lectures or documents. Each format has strengths and weaknesses, with courses choosing one, or a combination of both, depending on the course content. It is noticeable that some online courses, particularly ones that are free of charge, simply place hard copy directly onto the web without giving much thought to redesigning it for more interactive value, and certainly they save money and time by presenting course content this way. Other courses take great care to present content in an innovative way by combining text, images and sometimes audio and video to create engaging learning environments. The range of educational sites on the web is as varied as human experience itself. You can try to learn to cook, play a game, finish your secondary schooling or get a Masters degree via Internet based courses, the choice is up to the individual. So the aim of the course will often dictate its online characteristics, and it can be seen that online delivery is suited to learning across all walks of life, at any time of life.

Whatever the courses length or purpose, its content has to be placed on a computer accessible platform in the first place. Various types of course design tools exist to achieve this, whether it be a simple HTML authoring or kitchen sink (Barron, 1999, p 28) options that provide not only course authoring tools, but supporting materials, links, guided tutoring, multimedia access and assessment tools. Listed below are just a few of the online learning gateway websites that can be explored:

North Melbourne Institute of TAFE online; linked to TAFE Victorias online learning network.
http://www.nmit.vic.edu.au/resources

Web Course Tools; a major web course content and design provider
http://www.webct.com

The NODE; a worldwide learning network. The address given is for a Canadian gateway to the NODE that includes online learning tips and a virtual librarian.
http://www.thenode.canlearn.ca

The Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales; a site that offers advice to online course designers and learners.
http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/learning

ABOUT.com; offers general courses in just about anything
http://www.about.com

The BBC online; the BBC has been given over 60 million pounds to promote online learning and their website is a good gateway for exploring online learning.
http://www.bbc.org.uk

The above represent a fraction of the websites available and I have included more in an Appendix to this paper. I have not included specific examples of course authoring tools because the Websites above and in the Appendix are examples of their usage and also have links to other sites that evaluate online course authoring hardware and software, giving a far better overview of the options available that I could! Libraries have a wealth of choices available to them in online learning platforms. I have advocated that courses to promote information literacy would be ideal subject material for online delivery by libraries, but the choice of topic could be as broad as the subject coverage of libraries themselves. Whatever the choice, it opens up a new vista of possibilities for the delivery of library services to patrons.

The educating library
Libraries are still the epitome of what remains stable and trustworthy in the public mind, yet ironically it is libraries that have probably adapted fastest to the Internet as institutions. Historically libraries have been eager to adopt technologies that made the work easier, and have welcomed anything that enhanced the public access to information. We exist to keep information flowing (Wood, 2001) and have fought against censorship, and restrictive interpretations of intellectual property. While information is a commodity, libraries have been willing to treat it as one that should be free to all.

This is the great advantage that I believe libraries have, if they decide to move more actively into the provision of educational programs. Libraries as seen as having no agenda of their own to push. They exist to help. Up until now libraries have been content to form partnerships with educational institutions, or to act in symbiosis with online providers, to engage directly in education, but this sells our expertise as change managers and information specialists short. Why are we content to leave information literacy or web use education programs as merely an adjunct of our service mission to patrons? Why only place limited or tailored, localised material for information literacy and library use on the Web, in online accessible formats? If libraries do not take the trouble to teach the skills required for information literacy as mandated by CAUL and ALIA aggressively and inclusively, libraries will lose the opportunity to greatly influence the social, political and economic definitions of information literacy. This will, as a corollary, disempower those on the less privileged side of the digital divide, those less likely to visit Online Access Centres, those who do not enrol in Adult Education or TAFE programs. If libraries can provide access to the technology and the programs, we can render service to those who need it most.

Online delivery can bring us closer to the clients that we can help most effectively. How? Imagine theses scenarios:

1. A young adult is doing poorly at school with her English, particularly written expression. She logs on to the State Library and is directed to the Education Program co-ordinator who offers her the option of tutorials one on one with a librarian who specialises in Basic Literacy programs and web delivery, or to refer her to a technician who can locate literacy tutorial help in her area. The student opts for local contact. The student and the technician meet in a Chat room the next evening and discuss her needs. The technician searches the web for support material and local tutors, and then e-mails the student for another chat. They talk again and the student is pleased that someone is close by.
2. A technician is asked to provide a tutorial on Web Search Engines to a mature, housebound client. A multimedia broadband link allows streaming video to be fed from the Library studio to the home, where a library provided mobile broadband satellite link is located. The tutorial is delivered one on one, with practice and follow ups booked by the client.
3. Libraries around Australia combine resources to offer 24 hour basic information literacy programs through a web based course delivery platform. Those signing on can opt for free or subscription programs; with subscriptions helping to fund expansions in course offerings. The only difference between the free and subscription courses is that subscribers get access to links from the library gateway pages that would otherwise be restricted. The fee is nominal, and subsidised for the unemployed and pensioners.
4. A library technician in a school library designs and implements a web based intranet for the students, with Hyperlinks to sites of use in their work and leisure. The system is regularly updated and reviewed, with students given instruction on the system and its uses. The entire state school system is soon to be linked via the web and this program will be accessible more widely at that time.
5. The libraries around Australia decide to co-operate in setting up a proprietary company that consults on information literacy and web design issues. The company has no offices and any profits are directed to running the company, research on information literacy and providing free programs for less disadvantaged library users in Australia. The employees of the company are located around Australia, in all forms of libraries, are technicians and librarians with expertise in information retrieval and interpretation, IT systems design and deliver most requests on a maximum 24 hour turnaround, worldwide.

At least one of these ideas is happening already. You can see, though, that we are able now, in teaching terms, to move back to individual attention for learners wherever they are and at whatever stage of life they may be. Lifelong learning has never been a new concept for libraries because we have always been engaged in providing information for people throughout their lives. I do believe that we will have to make some shifts in our view of who we are as a profession and what our main role will be. Libraries were the dispensers of knowledge and we the gatekeepers. This is no longer the case, yet we have the chance to become identified as not just supporters of education but deliverers. Lifelong education will demand more educational opportunities and educational institutions. Career paths for technicians and librarians will broaden dramatically if the teaching role is expanded and indeed the new Training Package for the Advanced Diploma mandates such a change, focusing as it does on promoting information literacy and evaluation and assessment skills for Technicians. Libraries should be moving towards an expansion in teaching now.

Where will the money come from to support this expansion? Library finances are always under pressure and online delivery of learning is not a cheap option for education, that much is certainly true. However, if consultancy and course delivery mechanisms are scaled to cater for both cost recovery and profit making ventures, online delivery is economic and sustainable for all levels of patrons. An example might be offering offshore courses in information literacy for those who speak English as a second language, or offering pre-tertiary preparation courses for overseas students thinking of coming to Australia, then cycling profits from this into basic information literacy programs for local mature age unemployed. Another avenue of revenue generation might be to offer workplace information literacy assessments and programs, or undertaking research in information literacy for specific clients. Whatever the possibilities, if libraries make no move to uncover their potential, someone else will, with less concern for using profits to assist the disadvantaged. I must here declare, as you may have guessed, that libraries as profit making institutions make me uncomfortable. In information literacy terms, profit equals an agenda, and I believe libraries should have no agenda other than the betterment of the population that they serve, and so my emphasis on reinvesting profit to subsidise non profit ventures. Whatever the financial aims, I believe our mission has to evolve.

Library staff have seen themselves as agents for enhancing the flow of information, with limited forays into the interpretation of information, and the education of clients. Perhaps our future lies more in the direction of becoming educators who have a moral and ethical commitment to bridging the digital divide and promoting high levels of information literacy in the entire community, empowering individuals to reach their full potential as citizens. As institutions committed to serving all of society, libraries may end up as the only ones capable of improving the information literacy levels of the disadvantaged in society, through cost neutral education programs. I have said previously that it will be a fine line between us becoming patronising, censorial organisations and evaluative, nurturing ones but we do have decades of trust built between the public and ourselves. If anyone can promote information literacy in the 21^st century, it will be libraries.

Conclusion
This tour d'horizon of the future of information literacy, online learning and the educational mission of libraries has been necessarily brief. The best way to understand what the future may have in store is to experience it and a good first step might be to experience online learning firsthand through one of the many gateway websites available. it will be an odyssey towards an uncertain future, and certainly a long and very eventful journey, but libraries, and library technicians, are adaptable. At a professional and organisational level we have been equal to the task of change in the last thirty years. Now we have the opportunity to share our skills with our clients as never before and have the technology available to reach every person in the nation, wherever they may be, and to engage them in the lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

Author
Ellen Ennever has been a library technician for seventeen years and has worked I libraries for two decades. She is currently a casual at the University of Tasmania Library and is in her final semester of a BA in Adult and Vocational Education. She was National president of ALIA's Library Technicians Section in 1991 and has authored other materials on library technicans.

Appendix
If you wish to explore the concepts of Information Literacy and Online Learning further the following may be of interest:

Information Literacy

• Articles by Professor Philip Candy of Ballarat University
• ALIAs INFOLIT conferences from 1992 to date
• The abstracts from ALIAs RAISS conference later this year, available on the ALIA Website: http://alia.org.au
• The eJournal TechKnowLogia: subscription is free.

http://www.techknowlogia.org

Online Learning

• Click2learn: http://www.click2learn.com
• Hungryminds: http://www.hungryminds.com
• Knowledgenet: http://www.knowledgenet.com
• Learn.Com: http://www.learn.com
• Learnit Online: http://www.learnitonline.com
• Smartforce: http://www.smartforce.com
• Smartplanet: http://www.smartplanet.com
  or http://www.znet.com/smartplanet/

Bibliography
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Bruce, C. 2000a, "Information literacy research: dimensions of the emerging collective consciousness" , AARL, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 91-107.

Bruce, C. 2000b, "Information literacy programs and research: an international review",Australian Library Journal, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 209-218.

Bundy, A. 2001, "Information rights - the bottom line", inCite, Vol. 22, no. 5, p. 4.

Dellit, J. 2000, "Information literacy lessons from EdNA online", Australian Library Journal, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 219-232.

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Imel, S. 1990, "Perspectives on the future" in Galbraith, M. (ed), Adult learning methods: a guide for effective instruction, Kreiger, Florida.

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