Present: Faculty—Bruce, Dohse, Friedenberg, Hardy, Konz, Lee, McKnight, Moseley, Nelms, Rizzo, Ruiz, White-Carter, Katz; Student—Spencer; Alumni--Perry

1. Discussion of General Education program components and APC Reports: Library Research—We discussed the Library Research requirement (with original Library Research report submitted to APC). Jim Kuhlman and Janet Ferguson attended the meeting to answer questions we had about the current LR 102 course and about any alternatives that the Library faculty were considering.

Mr. Kuhlman gave us a brief history of the Bibliography and Library Research component of the General Education curriculum, and noted that the recent developments in information technologies have made information literacy very important and have made a review of LR 102 necessary. LR 102 faculty have been rethinking the requirement around the central goal of producing information literate graduates; information literacy, the point out, is best understood as the product of a career, rather than of a single course, especially a course taken in the first year of college. Our ability to achieve this outcome, moreover, is enhanced when information literacy skills and knowledge are connected to specific courses students are taking. Both Mr. Kuhlman and Ms. Ferguson noted that often freshmen are not at a point in their intellectual development where extensive library skills are meaningful to them; rather a more focused set of skills tied to courses they are enrolled in would make better sense.

Library staff are working presently to identify the skills students need at each stage in the college career. They are using the present web-based LR text to set up web-modules that might be used within existing courses to introduce students to the specific skills needed and resources available for content- and discipline-specific research. They are eager to try an embedded web-module approach in order to assess its effectiveness.

Ms. Spencer said that, as a student, she found one-to-one contact with Librarians helpful and wanted to know if such interactions would be likely in a differently structured information literacy program tied to other courses. Ms. White-Carter said that much of the possible interaction would depend on how instructors pursued Library Research within their courses, if the embedded approach were used. Dr. Dohse pointed out that computer literacy and information literacy are different things, and said that there was a danger that by treating them as the same we would dilute the significance of each, for faculty and for students. Dr Rizzo asked what an ideal model for an information literacy component might be. Mr. Kuhlman responded that the former program at Earlham College was his ideal, requiring students to take two Life Sciences courses, into which the Library Research component was woven. Students learned to do literature surveys, to use content-specific bibliographic tools, to evaluate sources, and so on. He believes a web-module approach embedded into existing courses might accomplish very similar ends.

We returned to our discussion of the web-module delivery of LR skills. Language 102 might be a course in which we might test this approach, they suggested. Library faculty could work on designing even more tailored resource guides that would meet the needs of Language 102 and other courses, even ones with a special topic focus; contact between students and library faculty could be built into course structures, depending on the needs and interests of faculty teaching the courses. A lecture series on different bibliographical topics might also be a possibility. Dr. Katz suggested that there might be faculty interested in exploring this model as a sort of pilot; Ms Ferguson said she would be interested in working on this. Katz will identify two or three additional faculty who will join him in volunteering to try out this approach.

2. End of semester matters—We briefly discussed some of the work we will need to do in the upcoming semester, including additional listening projects, research into general education alternatives, and faculty forums. Dr. Katz requested that task force members email him suggested topics for a faculty forum series. He suggested also that in the interest of winding up our discussion of the APC reports, we should do the Science reports in no more than two meetings. Dr. Rizzo said that we might be able to do a discussion of the 5-credit course in one session and the 3-credit course in another. This would involve having representatives from the five departments attend each session. Katz said he would explore this further with the chairs of these departments.

3. The first meetings of the spring 2002 semester will be Wednesday, 23 January and 30 January, 4:30 pm, in the Red Oak Room. Also, remember to keep the Wednesday, 4:30-5:30 timeslot clear in the spring and next year.