Librarians from all five campuses, in collaboration with faculty members and computing professionals, will incorporate the module into designated freshman-level courses as a pilot in Spring 1998. This curriculum would build on the efforts made by the UMass Literacy Project during the 1996-1997 academic year and the extensive and sophisticated efforts already being made at the public school level, in particular grades 7th through 12th. During the 1996-97 academic year, a core group of librarians and computing professionals from all five of the UMass campuses, with funding from the President's Office, met to develop a set of information literacy competencies that all UMass students should have before they graduate from the University. Ironically, the WWW helped to create the problem and the WWW provides the ideal delivery vehicle to solve it, because it is cost effective, pedagogically sound, resource based, and, with the right teaching, reinforces collaborative learning. The information technology explosion in libraries has made critical thinking skills more important than ever.
Students can find more materials about their topic more quickly than ever. . .
Formerly, librarians, with the help of faculty, provided a certain filtering mechanism because they chose certain reference sources or books or journals for the library collection. The World Wide Web has no such filtering mechanisms, which is both its strength and its weakness. At UMass Dartmouth, librarians find that more and more faculty are requiring that their students use the World Wide Web, then are dismayed at the sources students use. An information literacy module, based on the library model of going into a class once or twice over the course of a semester to teach basic research skills, would have the capacity to be delivered outside the boundaries of space and time and even discipline . . . For the last two decades, libraries have voiced the need for students to have formal course-integrated library instruction that would not only reinforce academic course work, but also would serve students by preparing them to be lifelong learners.