Information Literacy Teams: Bridging the Fluency Divide

students' most essential skills.Academic subjects cannot be covered completely in the classroom; content changes rapidly.IL is necessary for students to become effective participants in society.Although IL has its roots primarily in bibliographic instruction, students facing the economic world of the 21 st century need to know more than where the reference section is: they need to know about electronic information sources, know the uses of Boolean logic, and be able to analyze, synthesize and think critically.Students also need to understand the issues of free speech, censorship, access, and privacy, the ethical issues surrounding the dissemination, accessibility, and use of information 6 .Academic libraries have a long tradition of providing library instruction for their patrons.As early as the 1930s, Edith Coulter said that libraries should help students be self-reliant in the library by teaching them how to find information 7 .Self-sufficiency continues to be an important goal of library instruction because IL is fluid; as technology changes, expertise in reading, writing, critical thinking, visual literacy, mathematics, computers, and research play a role in being information literate.Recently, Abram and Luther 8 described today's students as NextGens (people born between 1982 and 2002), who do not see any difference in credibility or entertainment value between print and media formats.NextGens enjoy the exploration, navigation and discovery they are able to do on information appliances such as desktops, mobile telephones and PDA's 8 .They prefer and are accustomed to "Googling it" and like the convenience of the mouse-click, readable search engine, even though it yields articles, blogs, discussion threads, web sites, and/or encyclopedia items without discrimination.NextGens are nomadic and expect information to be available to them 24/7.They like to multitask.Growing up playing video games, to them content and technology are inseparable 8 .How do we bridge the literacy of one generation with the emerging, technology-embedded literacies of the future?A small group of faculty and librarians have been meeting regularly at our college to consider this question.