Harvard librarians’ information literacy and digital scholarship instruction

Abstract

At a large private university in the northeastern United States, library administrators wanted to advance common, curriculum-wide information literacy and digital scholarship instruction. Thus, administrative needs created a path for the purpose of this study, which was to understand the teaching practices of the university’s instruction librarians, how they had used the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in their instruction, and their perceived support of students’ digital scholarship methods. Using the general qualitative method, the researcher criterion-sampled the university’s instruction librarians and then collected data through semi-structured interviews. Interview data collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when library instructional services, the curriculum, and student scholarship necessitated digital transformation. The data were open-coded and analyzed to explore the participants’ textual and structural perceptions of their information literacy and digital scholarship instruction. The participants reported a range of teaching abilities and curricular objectives. Notably, only a few participants expressed comfort teaching digital scholarship methods. All participants perceived that their inconsistent graduate-level pedagogical and technological preparation, as well as a scarcity of sustained professional development at their current institution, affected their overall teaching abilities. The data revealed that instructional settings or formats and the depth of librarian-faculty teaching partnerships impacted the librarians’ perceptions of their teaching of information literacy and digital scholarship. The findings redirect the assumption that information literacy and digital scholarship instruction should be uniform across the curriculum. Implications from the findings for both Harvard Library and the field argue for greater administrative involvement to set instructional priorities, increase organizational cohesion for information literacy and digital scholarship instruction, and provide greater focus on inclusion- and instruction-oriented professional development opportunities. Lastly, recommendations are made for future research, including the assessment of library instruction and how it is situated to combat the challenges of misinformation, disinformation, and artificial intelligence.