Oberlin Students to Benefit from Mellon Grant that Promotes Information Literacy By Linda Grashoff
			FEBRUARY 23, 2000--A high-quality education is often defined as one that teaches students to learn, both inside and outside the classroom. As society relies increasingly on information that itself is burgeoning, learning how to learn becomes more complex. As they always have, students today must learn how to find information, evaluate it, and use it. But how to find, evaluate, and use information is now more difficult without specific skills. These skills are becoming known as information literacy, and increasingly such skills mean familiarity if not mastery of the interface with electronic-database technology, full-text electronic publications, and the World Wide Web. Oberlin College is about to share in $475,000--a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation--targeted at teaching students information literacy. Mellon recently awarded the grant to the Five Colleges of Ohio. The Ohio Five, as the consortium of colleges is often called, includes the College of Wooster, Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College, and Ohio Wesleyan University. Definitions of information literacy abound. Ray English--Oberlin's Root Director of Libraries and director of the Ohio Five information-literacy project--favors one that refers to the general knowledge that students need to acquire no matter what topic they investigate as well as advanced knowledge and particular skills appropriate for their major field of study. Specifically, English says, students must understand how information is produced, disseminated and organized; understand basic tools for accessing information, such as catalogs, databases, and indices; be able to develop search strategies for accessing information; learn how to evaluate information critically; and know how to use information appropriately, taking into account scholarly conventions and concepts of intellectual property. Under the Ohio Five information-literacy program, members of the teaching faculties will collaborate with librarians at each school to create new or revised courses that incorporate information literacy. Several initiatives supported by the grant will prepare the librarians for collaborative work with faculty. The first will be a May symposium at Denison that will focus on the goals of the Mellon grant. Several Oberlin librarians, besides English, are likely to participate. In the summer at least one representative librarian from each of the five schools will attend the weeklong Information Literacy Institute of the Association of College and Research Libraries, which will take place at Kent State University. Jessica Grimm and Megan Mitchell, reference librarians in the Main Library, will attend for Oberlin. Meanwhile, the Ohio Five will create a web site devoted to the information-literacy program, and a prototype course-development project will get under way. The prototype will involve one of Oberlin's librarians and one member of the Oberlin faculty. (Each Ohio Five school will sponsor a prototype.) Oberlin's prototype course, says English, probably will be taught this coming fall, by which time a call will have gone out for other course-development projects, to be given competitive grant awards. Over the three years of the Mellon grant, each school will fund an average of nine awards. The first full-blown courses highlighting information literacy should be in place in spring or--more likely--fall 2001, says English. "In later stages of the grant we especially hope," English says, "to incorporate information literacy in the proposed freshman seminars, which the College Faculty passed in principle at its most recent meeting. The Mellon grant includes funding to develop comprehensive resource materials that will be available to faculty on an Ohio Five web site, and to hire temporary staff to replace librarians working on grant activities. The Mellon information-literacy grant builds on another grant received by the Five Colleges of Ohio. In 1998 the AT&T Foundation awarded $50,000 to develop a web-based tutorial for basic information-literacy skills.
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