History and Goals
Originally, the Instruction Commons
program was a four-year grant project
known as the Undergrad Commons.
It was co-funded by the ISU Library and
the Carver Charitable Trust. As the
Instruction Commons, the scope of
this program now includes all levels of
the ISU curricula, including
undergraduate, graduate, and special
classes with a library research
instruction component.
The
Instruction Commons is an information
literacy program designed to integrate
electronic resources and library
research instruction into ISU classes.
Librarians partnering with Iowa State
University teaching faculty are
providing a new approach to teaching ISU
students about the effective use of
networked electronic information and
publications, along with more
traditional print resources.
What is
meant by "information literacy?"
Briefly, information literacy refers to
a person's ability to "recognize when
information is needed and have the
ability to locate, evaluate, and use
effectively the needed information."1
At institutions of higher education in
the United States, the problem many
students face when doing research is not
whether anything on the topic will be
found, but rather how to streamline
one's search, choose the appropriate
resources to use, and to focus on truly
relevant, authoritative, and scholarly
materials, rather than relying too much
on web search engines and thousands of
supposedly relevant web pages. The
popularity of the web and the increased
ease of use and refinement of web search
engines ensure plenty of "hits" on
virtually any topic, but students need
to know not only how to critically
evaluate all these materials for
reliability, authority, currency, and
scholarly credibility, but also to be
aware of and use other information
choices available to them in the form of
research databases, scholarly print and
electronic materials - resources often
held by their institution's libraries.
The
Commons program is a means of
introducing students to the true wealth
of information choices available to them
via the ISU Libraries, including
scholarly websites and networked
resources of all kinds. Librarians are
in a unique position in regard to the
information explosion and ever-changing
information technologies, because we are
working on a daily basis with
information access resources such as
databases, electronic indexes, catalogs,
and search engines that organize and
make available the content to which
these tools point - no less than the
world's recorded and collected
knowledge. Indeed, librarians are often
the developers of these systems. As new
resources are developed, or as more
familiar databases change search
features and interfaces, librarians are
constantly at the forefront of these
changes and are quite literally learning
and re-learning means of information
access and retrieval using these tools,
and we teach this knowledge to others
every day.
Faculty
who collaborate with librarians through
the Commons program have a unique
opportunity as well to learn and
re-learn new information access
resources in their fields. Even
familiar databases are constantly
changing interfaces, adding new
features, or providing broader
coverage. Ways that databases can be
accessed are also constantly changing,
as the ISU Library seeks to broaden
remote access to its digital resources
to the ISU community - regardless of
where that community is located.
Faculty
collaborating with the Commons have also
remarked on the improved quality of
student coursework and background
research. The Commons can and does make
a difference in student learning
outcomes. Students themselves have
reported, through evaluation data, that
the Commons has had a positive impact on
their class work, and that they have
learned research skills through the
Commons that they will be able to use in
other classes. They have also reported
that their knowledge of reliable web
resources as well as relevant library
resources increased because of their
class collaboration with the Commons.
From
its modest beginnings in Spring 1999 as
an 11-page website with three
participating classes, the Commons
website alone has grown to over 7000
files, and has reached thousands of
undergraduate and graduate-level
students from across the ISU curriculum
over the years. The Commons continues
its original goals of aspiring to reach
and teach students and the ISU
community, helping them to achieve
information literacy skills that will
support their studies while at ISU and
lifelong learning after graduation.
1. American
Library Association. Presidential
Committee on Information Literacy. Final
Report. (Chicago: American Library
Association, 1989.)
http://www.ala.org/acrl/nili/ilit1st.html
