Information Literacy as Professional Legitimation: A Critical Analysis

Information literacy (IL) was first articulated through the American Library Association (ALA) and via professional documents such as the Information Literacy: Final Report (ALA, 1989), IL standards, and model learning outcomes. This early rhetoric is the most widely accepted articulation and rationale for IL and continues to provide a framework for discourse to this day. It is also often used to communicate libraries' education mission to external stakeholders. The content of these documents originated during a peculiar moment of LIS history and served a particular legitimating function for the profession. This article will deconstruct the underlying assumptions behind the rhetoric of these early articulations and make recommendations for reconceptualizing IL. Keywords: Information literacy; critical theory; Radical Democratic Theory; document analysis; professional standards Introduction Twenty years ago the American Library Association (ALA) published the Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report (1989). This report (hereafter referred to simply as the Final Report) provided a widely accepted definition of information literacy (IL) as the ability to recognize when information is needed and "locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information" (p. 1). It also articulated a rationale for its importance to contemporary American society. The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), extended the ALA's definition of IL through Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning: Standards and Indicators (1998) and Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000) respectively. Although IL has been developed in varying ways since its inception, these early documents remain important because they are the Association's formal conceptualizations of IL. Furthermore, they are likely to be used to communicate a singular, unified vision of IL to external stakeholders and therefore continue to have some significance for librarians and their clients. These early IL documents emerged in a unique historical context, which exerted influence on both their form and content. Foster (1993) suggests that IL was originally a professional response to being omitted from the dialog on educational reform in the early 1980s. O'Connor (2006) examines this claim and finds compelling evidence for it in early IL discourse. The reform movement, which tied funding (and hence survival) directly to one's ability to demonstrate explicit learning outcomes, coincides with a period when fiscal crises in public finance and the advancement of information technology already threatened (or at least were perceived to threaten) to deprofessionalize librarianship (O'Connor, 2006). Though school and academic librarians had sought an educational mission throughout their history (Lorenzen, 2001; O'Connor, 2006), libraries had largely been valued more for their repository than their educational functions (Abbott, 1988). Librarians in the early 1980s began to worry that the rise of information technology might threaten the need for such repositories. Hence, tying libraries and librarians directly to the educational mandates of the reform movement (and thus to funding) seemed and, perhaps, still seems critical to the survival of school and academic librarians. This early conceptualization of IL emerged with little explicit theory to guide its development. Because these documents have not been revised or replaced, they also do not reflect the wealth of IL scholarship that has ensued since their inception. Without a sound theoretical framework, the rationale for IL articulated by the Final Report is at times theoretically inconsistent and overstated, making overreaching claims for the function of IL in society (ALA, 1989). On the other hand, the conceptualization of IL developed in the standards documents is overly technical, emphasizing the acquisition of skills over intellectual maturation. …