Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler ,
(818) 677-2130
carmen.chandler@csun.edu

CSUN Librarians Helping Thousands of Students
to Discover the Joy of Learning in a Library

CSUN librarians are developing plans for local high schools and the university to improve the information competency of their students.

"When our students do not have the appropriate information competence skills, their education is affected," said Susan C. Curzon, dean of the University Library. "In an age when information and knowledge are so abundant from so many sources, it is very important for our students to be sophisticated in their ability not only to locate relevant information but also to evaluate it critically."

CSUN's library has received more than $26,000 in grants from the CSU Chancellor's Office to develop programs to tackle the problem of information competency.

Ann Perkins, chair of the Library's Reference and Instructional area, is working with local high school principals, English teachers and librarians to identify the information competency problems they see on their campuses and to come up with some solutions. She and a colleague at CSU San Marcos have written a handbook designed to teach high schoolers how to use a library.

Librarian Karin Duran has been working with CSUN's faculty to develop programs at the university to improve the library skills of its students. Among their suggestions is a plan to include library training as part of the university's freshman seminar, a proposed mandated course for new students to provide them with the basic skills - such as study habits and time management - to succeed in college.

"Trying to figure out how to use a library can be really overwhelming for a lot of people," Perkins said. "If they can't figure out how to use a library, they are losing access to information -knowledge - that can help them succeed in life, whether they go to college or not."

Perkins said a survey of 880 incoming freshman in the fall of 1998 indicated that only 47 percent of them knew how to use a library.

Every day, she said, students coming to the reference desk in the university library have trouble just formulating their search questions, let alone knowing how to find the information they need once they figure it out.

"Some are not even clear on the difference between a book and a journal," she said.

Duran said she believes the teaching of library skills in the K-12 system began to suffer as California's school districts were forced to deal with budget cuts.

"Librarians were removed as top priorities in elementary schools. Today, most elementary schools don't even have librarians, and if they do they're part time," she said. "The consequences of those economic decisions have been a long time coming.

"The concepts of using a library and knowing how to assess information are so nebulous and taken for granted that they are sometimes hard to value," she said. "It isn't until these tools are gone that we realize how much harm we have done California's kids. They aren't learning how to read or to think critically."

Duran said the love of reading that a library can foster in a young child creates a sense of independence, "a sense of wonder and confidence that they have the skills to go into a big place and figure out how to find what they want in it. Those are the skills they need to operate effectively in the world."

Perkins said the handbook she is working on will hopefully provide high school students with those skills.

She and her colleague at San Marcos, after consulting with librarians, teaches and principals at local 17 high schools, have identified five basic information competency skills they think students should have by the time they graduate from high school:

• Articulate research questions.
• Use a library catalogue and other resources to locate and retrieve information.
• Develop and implement search strategies for independent research.
• Evaluate the quality of information and its relevancy to their topics.
• Organize, synthesize and apply information in a logical form.

She said the handbook will include exercises to familiarize students with a library and everything it has to offer.

Duran said she is working with CSUN's faculty to create an emphasis on information competency skills within the curriculum.

She said the concept has to go beyond just having a course in how to use the library, or the inclusion of information competency skills in the freshman seminar.

She said when students are required to take a course on how to use the library, they sometimes don't make the connection that what they are learning is applicable to everything they do.

"When you say the word 'library,' people tend to think of the building, not the information it contains, which now includes information on the World Wide Web, and how to access that information," she said. "But once you know how to use a library, nobody can hold you back because you can get whatever you need - the sky's the limit and you take as little or as much as you want."