Heidi Lm Jacobs

Reconnecting Information Literacy Policy with the Core Values of Librarianship

In 2009, President Barack Obama declared October of that year to be National Information Literacy Awareness Month and issued a proclamation stating that an informed and educated citizenry is essential to the functioning of our modern democratic society. The Obama proclamations emphasis on information literacys role in education and democracy makes it akin to the 2005 Alexandria Proclamation on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning. In both of these documents, information literacy is located at the core of lifelong learning. It empowers people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use, and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational, and educational goals. These two documents are powerful and inspiring to many academic librarians because they are reminders of the broader social context and democratic initiatives within their work. Inspiring as these documents are, they can also be intimidating and overwhelming: how can we help create an informed and educated citizenry or help our students meet technological, economic, and social challenges, to redress disadvantage and to advance the well-being of all? This article is not an attempt to provide answers to these questions but a call to move these questions to the fore of our policy and pedagogical discussions. By revisiting seminal documents like the Alexandria Proclamation, the Association of College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, and the American Library Associations (ALA) Core Values of Librarianship, we argue that information literacy is full of possibilities to explore rather than problems to be solved. To this end, we summon discussions of Appreciative Inquiry and critical information literacy and foreground the ALA Core Values as ways to reengage with the possibilities and potentials within information literacy to meet larger social goals.

Introduction: Valuing Librarianship: Core Values in Theory and Practice

In 2011 we published an article in Library Trends where we concluded, It is worth considering why the ALA Core Values seem to have lost their traction or relevance in the daily work librarians perform. There may be political, institutional, professional, or organizational reasons why this has happened and these factors would be well worth exploring (Jacobs & Berg, 2011, p. 391). In 2014, as the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the American Library Associations (ALA) Core Values of Librarianship came and went without any scholarly or professional attention, we found we were still considering these questions and issued a call to librarians and LIS faculty to explore these questions along with us. As Maura Seale eloquently asserts in her contribution to this special issue, ALAs Core Core Values of Librarianship (2004) wants to tell a story (p. 596). This special issue, Valuing Librarianship: Core Values in Theory and Practice, is an attempt to tell some of those stories. The Core Values of Librarianship statement was adopted by the ALA Council in 2004. The development and adoption of the statement was lively, vocal, and highly controversial; however, since its adoption the conversation related to the document has been relatively quiet—discussed infrequently , applied sparingly, and cited modestly. When one compares the application and citations of the Core Value document (cited twelve times in Scopus) to that of the ACRLs Standards of Information Literacy, also adopted in 2004 (cited 939 times in Scopus), the difference is remarkable. 1 When cited in the literature, the Core Value statement is mostly used as a brief reference point in research or discussions. The Core Values are often referenced in the literature as a means to anchor, promote, or justify specific projects or approaches to services 460 library trends/winter 2016 or in-depth investigations of how an individual value or cluster of values guide(s) librarians practice or philosophy. 2 By asking practitioners and LIS scholars to explore librarianships past, present, and future in relation to the eleven Core Values outlined by the ALA, this collection brings the Core Values themselves and the statement to the fore of the conversation. Using the Core Values of Librarianship statement as a framework, this special issue of Library Trends explores how these Core Values have (or have not) informed, influenced, guided, and contextualized libraries and …