If you follow your nose far enough into citations, you inevitably come across something from the past that recontextualizes things you think about everyday. Most information literacy/library instruction program coordinators (parse that phrasing as you will) have assessment on the brain in one form or another. Articles continue to pour forth on the topic and many of us seem to be almost in a state of perpetual hand-wringing about the effectiveness of our instruction and the importance of our libraries in the educational lives of our students, sometimes to the point of using statistics in – how should one say it? – somewhat “creative” ways.
But we can stop worrying. Someone already did it for us. And it’s documented in Richard Hume Werking’s 1980 Library Trends article, “Evaluating Bibliographic Education: A Review and Critique.” (Back issues of LT are at http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/999)
If you’re not familiar with the Feagley Library Orientation Test for College Freshmen, developed at Columbia University circa 1955, or the (now at the top of my reading list) article “Arrows for Freshmen” (Margaret Barkeley, Library Journal, May 15, 1939), this piece is for you.
A recent assessment of student research papers undertaken last semester where I work? See (more or less) Thomas G. Kirk, CRL 32:465-74, Nov. 1971.
Verily careers are built on reinventing the wheel. But how many of us know when we’re doing it?
A side note: Richard Werking now seems to be in the history department at Annapolis. His 2003 article in portal, “Vessels and Voyagers: Some Thoughts on Reading and Writing, Books and Libraries,” is a remarkable reminder of (recent) historical worries about the future of the book in the growing “digital age.” For more on this see the special issue Library Trends (1997) on the Benton Foundation’s report Buildings, Books and Bytes: Libraries and Communities in the Digital Age. Poke around the Benton website; you can find some interesting articles from the mid ’90s about the coming “information superhighway.”
