The Librarian asTeacher in the Networked Environment

Brendan A. Rapple

any traditional conceptions of libraries and librarianship have little relevance today because

of the proliferation of electronic technol- ogy. Though nearly everyone agrees that radical changes are occurring, they do not agree on what the library of the next mil- lennium will be like. Some even contend that computerization will take over and sound the library’s death knell. As a recent article in The Economist ( 1994) states, “All the contents of all the li- braries, say some visionaries, will be everywhere. And the library itself will be nowhere” (“Keeping Libraries Alive” 14). Others argue that the Internet and elec- tronic access to information will leave librarians with little to do. Certainly the world of the Internet appeals to many members of the academic community who are beginning to alter radically how they access, process, and exchange infor- mation. Some commentators argue that as more users become electronically sophis- ticated and as the technology becomes more usable, traditional reference and other liaison services between librarian and faculty/students/patrons will become well-nigh obsolete.

Nevertheless, the complete virtual library is not yet here; nor will it be here for a long time. Although many faculty and students are becoming more informa-

Brendan A. Rapple is the English biblio- grapher at the O’Neill Library of Boston Col- lege in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

tionally competent, the complexity of the environment is also increasing. It will not always be obvious to many, perhaps most, users how to approach the vast resources available electronically through the Information Superhighway, how to evaluate them, how to retrieve informa- tion, in short how to use libraries most efficiently. As Fisher and Bjorner (1994) state, “By and large, end-users-even thoughtful and intelligent ones-underes- timate the complexity of the information world” (283). Information specialists will still be needed to provide assistance. In fact, the librarian’s traditional function as mediator between information and patron will expand and become more diffuse and challenging.

Partners with Faculty

Traditionally, reference services fo- cused on helping faculty and students locate material within the four walls of the home library. With the advent of the electronic library, librarians must now teach not only these home resources, but also point to the existence of, and means to access, the vast aggregate of global material. They must indicate local, na- tional and international catalogues, an immense world of government and busi- ness resources, local and distant CD- ROM bibliographic databases, an abun- dance of full-text databases, the increas- ingly important realm of electronic jour- nals, and up-to-the-minute news of local and world events on the Internet. They

must help teach e(1ectronic)-mail, an increasingly fundamental source of both academic and other information. They must point to listservs and other online discussion lists and newsgroups, “an extremely important way to facilitate and extend scholarship across traditional dis- ciplinary as well as geographic bound- aries” (Cartwright and Kovacs 1995,50).

Not only will librarians help faculty and students do research, they will also help faculty develop new pedagogical methods for the electronic age. Many will become much more active in curriculum design, in devising and evaluating assign- ments, in team teaching, and in teaching for-credit courses. They will become true partners and fellow educators with facul- ty. William Miller (1 992) aptly remarked: “As collection building becomes less im- portant, it seems inevitable that the notion of the teaching library will become the primary one to which the profession as- pires” (153).

It is likely that all will not be smooth. An increase in the teaching role of librar- ians will inevitably encounter resistance from some faculty members, some who may embrace a culture, according to Larry Hardesty (1995), that is “character- ized by a resistance to change, particular- ly a change promoted by those (such as librarians) who are not perceived as shar- ing fully in the culture and are not pro- moting values (bibliographic instruction) compatible with it” (354). However, this opposition must be overcome if students

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and faculty themselves-a research li- brary’s main stakeholders-are to use most effectively the vast resources of the exponentially developing electronic li- brary.

Another challenge to the transforming role of the library stems from faculty and

ties of the Internet or of the electronic environment of most universities’ li- braries. Indeed, as DuMont and Schlo- man (1995) declare, “The level of stress experienced by an incoming student on first entering the library is almost incom- prehensible to the average library staff

autobiographies, journals, diaries, letters; how to gain access to foreign language material, to declassified documents, and a host of other types of materials. Using today’s electronic research library, with its great increase in resources, is far more difficult.

administrators who cling to a traditional view of the library “as a symbolic repre- sentation of the scholarly stature and pres- tige of the university” (Frye 1992, 35). They believe that funds should go toward building up the physical collections. How- ever, the number of volumes in a library may not be nearly as significant as the li- brarians’ ability to provide electronic access to global information. In many in- stitutions the librarian as information mediator and as teacher will become more important than the librarian as the devel- oper of local collections.

As Timothy C. Weiskel (1988) said,

. . . i t is becoming clear that major new commitments to teaching tasks are emerg- ing within the university independent ofthe traditional mechanisms c$ control by the fucitlry. . . . Faculty who wish jealously to guard their role as teachers may find that they muzzle or restrain the teaching role of the professional librarians whose expertise in these realms they can rarely hope to match. To the extent that this occurs, stu- dents and the institution as a whole will deprive themselves of the full potential of electronic research technology. (4344)

The goal is that the wider campus com- munity, and above all faculty, will wel- come and trust librarians as vital col- leagues and not regard them as mere operatives. It is especially desirable in the electronic library that, as part of this process, many librarians will continue to play their established role in providing library instruction.

As good teachers, librarians should strive to understand students’ level of preparation in library and information technology. Though young students are often more at home with technology than are those of older generations, librarians must beware of making the mistake of assuming too much computer literacy. Many of today’s students still have great difficulty functioning successfully in the electronic research library. For the most part their adroitness at Pacman, Nintendo, Doom, Myst, and other computer games has not prepared them for the complexi-

member” (9 1 ). Not all American students come from

homes possessing a personal computer or schools well equipped with technology. Moreover, many foreign students in the U.S. have had little exposure to comput- ers. The undergraduate population is ex- tremely diverse, counting among its ranks many 40-, 50-, 60-year-olds, retirees, laid-off employees, mothers, fathers, grandparents who are returning part-time, even full-time, to college (or attending for the first time). On many campuses the eighteen or nineteen year-old undergrad- uate is no longer typical.

The diversity of the student body corre- sponds to the great variation in computer knowledge and technological skills. As Cerise Oberman ( 1 995) writes, the belief that today’s students possess “a comfort level with computers that far exceeds that of most librarians” is not firmly grounded (36). There is no doubt that great numbers of students, of all ages, are overwhelmed by the plethora of resources and searching tools in the changing electronic library, and they cannot function well unaided.

Evan Farber (1995) recently observed apropos of undergraduates’ library knowledge that the aphorism Plus €a change plus c’est lu mEme chose is par- ticularly appropriate, for it was never easy to use research libraries well (Farber passim). Even before the arrival of com- puterization, undergraduates frequently had difficulty using the card catalogues, the periodical indexes, and the micro- forms. Moreover, most did not intuitively know the difference between popular and academic periodicals, between printed and electronic journals, between general and specialized bibliographies; how to find back issues of newspapers; under- stand the precise function of dictionairies, thesauri, encyclopedias, handbooks, con- cordances; how to locate reviews, ab- stracts, conference proceedings, disserta- tions, working papers, government data, numeric data; distinguish between such bibliographical sources as biographies,

Evaluating the Evanescent Furthermore, not only must librarians

teach the manual skills needed to access such resources as the Internet, they must also foster the mental framework neces- sary for dealing with such an evanescent tool. Students must realize that the Inter- net is in constant flux and is ever growing. Also, the Internet contains far greater ranges in quality of information than ever existed in the traditional library. Vast quantities of what students can easily access electronically are little better than garbage. The great problem is “sorting good (useful, relevant, reliable) informa- tion from bad (unreliable, false, extrane- ous)” (Pask and Snow 1995, 308). Young students have always tended to believe everything that was written down in print. Today many make the analogous mistake of trusting everything they read on a com- puter screen. As Blandy and Libutti ( 1995) remark, “Finding the information they want on the Internet, [students] are often unwilling to subject it to the canons of scholarship” (295).

In the traditional library it always took much time and much teaching before the average young undergraduate understood the difference between an article in People and one in the American Journal of Polit- ical Science, perceived the lies pervading the Protocols of Zion, grasped that the his- tory in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena may be weak and by no means accepted by all ancient historians. We need to teach these evaluative skills; however, the problem has been compounded by the great elec- tronic influx of information. The librarian must play a major role in helping students identify credible resources and discrimi- nate among information.

Although the embarrassment of riches may be very exciting, accessing them is often extremely frustrating, even alienat- ing, for the undergraduate. Moreover, there is little standardization among the hardware and software products of a growing number of computer companies.

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It is not just a matter of a patron learning to use one particular database, software package, or keyboard. Researchers are confronted with a mystifying array of electronic tools, not all of which are intu- itively easy to use. Further, it is true that much of the world’s information is still in print form. Consequently, students must learn how to locate and use print re- sources as well as master the intricacies of the Internet and computer databases. Librarians must encourage students to use traditional sources and understand their utility, especially since many stu- dents tend to “prefer inappropriate com- puterized data bases to appropriate print sources“ (Tierney 1992, 69). Just as scribal culture coexisted for a lengthy period with Gutenberg’s invention, print culture will also coexist with the new electronic text for a long time.

With the inevitable increase in net- working and the use of networked re- sources, the traditional approach to teacher-directed pedagogy, where the governing metaphor is that of the lectur- er-listener, will gradually change. Facul- ty, librarians, and students will become a community of learners where all enrich each other and all learn together. Whether or not the traditional lecture will remain the primary faculty vehicle for transmit- ting information in an increasingly net- worked environment, librarians must pre- pare for library instruction that is indifferent to proximity. No longer will it be mandatory that the librarian always be in a classroom with the students, whether in a library classroom or in the profes- sor’s own, when teaching about library and information resources. With the establishment of more and more teaching models that are not centered on teacher and classroom and that are accessible twenty-four hours a day, video, sound,

pictures, and words will all have an essential role. As networking and net- worked information become the norm, librarians will break away from the tradi- tional paradigm and help institute a vari- ety of innovative teaching models.

Stephen Brier (1995) is correct that “a healthy skepticism about technology’s purposes should not preclude our willing- ness to search for educationally appropri- ate ways to design, produce, and imple- ment new forms of educational tech- nology that can help students become active and critical learners” (16). Never- theless, technology alone cannot yet ade- quately teach all aspects of accessing, retrieving, and evaluating-especially evuluutinginformation. Moreover, while many rightly laud the wonders of the information revolution, the accompanying dangers are sometimes forgotten.

As Neil Postman (1 995) remarks,

Behind the existing onslaught of informa- tion in every imaginable form of storage- on paper, on video and audio tape, on disks, film and silicon chips-is an even greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Information has become a form of garbage. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnect- ed from usefulness. We are swamped by information, have no control over it, and don’t know what to do with it. (12)

And this is precisely why librarians must not only be in the forefront of Brier’s search for excellent pedagogical uses for technology, but must remain in the van- guard of users’ involvement with this avalanche of information.

Librarians, in short, play a dynamic, central role in the present and future edu- cational mission of universities.

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DuMont, M. J., and B. F. Schloman. 1995. The evolution and reaffirmation of a library orientation program in an academic re- search library. Reference Services Review 23(1, Spring): 85-93.

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