Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Literacies Large And Small: The Case Of Information Literacy, James Elmborg

James K. Elmborg

Information Literacy has been an important movement in academic libraries for at least the past decade. Still, no consensus has emerged about how to define information literacy or how broadly or narrowly to apply literacy theory to the work of librarians. In fact, the historical definitions of librarianship have tended to work against the integration of literacy theory into the daily practices of librarianship. These definitions have emphasized protecting the library as warehouse of externalized knowledge and the librarian as mediator between that knowledge and the students and faculty who need to use it in the educational process. The end …