The Future of Information Literacy: Transforming the World

Information literacy is currently understood as embracing the ability to define a problem, find information to solve the problem, evaluate the information, and use it effectively. In theory, these broad competencies encompass the entire research process and, ideally, should be integrated across the curriculum. In practice, however, most librarians continue to teach one-shot sessions on locating information, and rarely find the time or opportunity to develop applications of the theory. In part, our difficulty in gaining rapid and widespread acceptance of information literacy results from our attempt to fit this revolutionary idea within a traditional teaching paradigm, which diminishes it