Tracing Boundaries, Effacing Boundaries: Information Literacy as an Academic Discipline

Both librarianship and composition have been shaken by recent developments in higher education. In libraries ebooks and online databases threaten the traditional library as warehouse model, while in composition, studies like The Citation Project show that students are not learning how to incorporate sources into their own writing effectively. This dissertation examines the disciplinary origins and current status of information literacy and makes a case for increased collaboration between Writing Studies and librarians and the eventual emergence of information literacy as a discipline in its own right. Chapter One introduces the near-total failure of information literacy pedagogy and the lack of communication between the two disciplines. Chapter Two traces the disciplinary evolution of information literacy from a new concept in the 1970s to its current status. Chapter Three examines the current state of affairs in information literacy by analyzing library and writing program websites to see if and how each addresses information literacy. Chapter Four provides the results of surveys of librarians and writing instructors wherein they describe information literacy teaching and assessment at their own institutions and lay out their visions for the future of information literacy. Chapter Five studies a librarian and a writing instructor who put some of these ideas into action over the course of the 2011-2012 school year. Chapter Six surveys the relationship of accrediting bodies to information literacy and provides recommendations for the future of information literacy instruction that will cross disciplinary lines and allow for both librarians and compositionists to play to their strengths as they establish the new discipline of information literacy