Patrick Noon

Finding a strategic role for information skills in academic libraries

Patrick Noon
From Information skills in academic libraries. SEDA Paper 82, 1994. Reproduced with permission.

The concept of user education in libraries is not particularly new although interest in it does seem to move in cycles. It is difficult to imagine it having much of a place in the kind of medieval library portrayed in Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' . When the only people allowed into the library are the Librarian and his Assistant no-one else gets much chance to use information skills. It is equally doubtful whether Marx was ever taught about the classification scheme whilst he was using the British Museum Reading Room. But for the past 20 years or so user education has been part of the vocabulary of academic libraries in the United Kingdom. During the 1970's several books appeared on the subject, the Travelling Workshop Experiment attempted a practical approach to user education and the British Library established a post of Information Officer for User Education which in turn spawned even more books and articles and even a journal 'Infuse' as well as a succession of courses and conferences.

By the mid 1980's however, interest seemed to have waned. The Information Officer post was not continued by the British Library and with its demise the flow of publications largely evaporated. Everyone, it seemed, was now interested in new preoccupations such as information technology. Recently, however, there has been a clear renewal of interest in user education. At least three surveys have been carried out into information skills teaching in further and higher education and there are even new books appearing on the subject.

Clearly the idea of user education has remained a concern within academic libraries in particular, but after 20 years or so of activity how well established is it? Judging by the evidence of John Cowley's survey, not as established as you might have expected. Having reviewed the available literature, Cowley (1987) concludes:

[the post war period] has been long enough for there to have developed both a wealth of experience and level of performance sufficient to guarantee a full acceptance of user education.... The study of recent literature suggests however that this is not the case...

to emphasise this lack of genuine progress Cowley continues "The whole field of user education is beset by doubts and difficulties."

The survey of polytechnics and universities also carried out by Cowley (1988) reinforces this apparent failure to build upon the obvious enthusiasm and drive of the 70's and early 80's. Although the vast majority of libraries provide basic induction sessions, the number providing any post induction programmes begins to decline rapidly and those who provide assessed programmes integrated into courses account for a very small percentage. Cowley's surveys of both the literature and practice suggest that a major reason for this lack of development is due to the resources constraints that libraries have experienced throughout the 80's. As staffing has decreased, libraries have concentrated on '...defending basic services' whilst '...exploitative forms of activity have declined...'

The phrases that Cowley has picked up in his survey are quite interesting and suggest a more fundamental reason for the lack of development of user education. The phrases clearly portray the idea of user education being somehow outside of the basic services that libraries have to offer. It is as if the exploitation of services is only something that libraries need to do when they have the time. It is a perception echoed by Maurice Line (1983)

Either [user education] is so important that other aspects of library activities can be set aside for it or libraries have been so well staffed that they can do it without detriment... to any of the other activities that one would expect to have priority.

This philosophy seems to be reflected in the situation in many institutions where the user education programme has been developed through the efforts of dedicated and enthusiastic individual members of staff rather than as a matter of library policy. Cowley reports a general feeling that there is no policy direction for teaching information skills and that the staff involved feel a sense of isolation.

Clearly there is still a distinct uncertainty about what exactly user education is and what exactly its role should be in higher education. Indeed, if it is so optional that it can be dropped in hard times, does it have any role at all? The purpose of this chapter is to explore what that role might be and to attempt to clarify the contribution that user education or information skills or whatever else we call it can and should make to the overall service provided by libraries in higher education. Part of this will involve looking in a bit more detail at what some of the critics of user education have had to say.

Much that has been written about user education makes the unquestioning assumption that the concept is implicitly a good thing and concentrates on ways in which it can best be achieved or delivered. Although more recent books and articles refer to the criticisms of their detractors in passing, no one has examined in much detail what they actually were saying and what, if anything, can be learned from those criticisms to improve or redirect user education. Many of the criticisms have some validity because they highlight an approach to providing library services that is more concerned with its own structure than with what the benefits might be to the users of the service. Some of the criticisms are also wrong and in refuting them it is possible to gain a better insight into just what contribution user education should be making to academic library services today.

The emphasis throughout the 70's seemed to be on the objectives of user education and what the benefits might be. Broadly these were:

• information skills are a skill for life,
• the scale of available information requires skills to exploit it effectively,
• changing teaching patterns place more responsibility on students to find their own resources,
• library systems often present barriers to users that user education can break down.

Fjallbrant and Malley (1984), from whom these justifications come, then go on to look at how courses can be designed most effectively, concentrating on objectives, goals and delivery. Much of the rest of the literature adopts a similar approach all apparently predicated upon the belief that having justified user education all that remains is to get the design and delivery right.

This seems to leave a large and significant gap where the management or strategic role of user education should be. Most writers nod in acknowledgement that user education should be an integrated part of a complete library service but there is little evidence of any discussion of this integration and how it might be achieved. Instead, there is the anguished lament that this has still not been accepted as a strategic part of the library service by what Stevenson (1977) calls '... the conservative tradition of many chief librarians...'

Yet none of the many able commentators on user education have addressed in depth this question of the role of user education within the whole service. Instead they have concentrated on objectives and justification, looking introspectively upon its own intrinsic value rather than looking circumspectly  at the contribution that user education should be making to the aims and objectives of library services. Furthermore it is possible that it is this introspection that has allowed several detractors to develop quite scathing critiques of the whole basis of user education. In particular Ray Lester (1979) was able to launch a systematic demolition of some cherished tenets of user education philosophy. Lester states his case quite clearly:

Most library user education in our educational institutions ....at present seems to be based on two assumptions:

(a) That it is the librarian's job formally to teach users how to use the library and search for information.

(b) That the details of how to use libraries and search for information can indeed be formally taught.

I believe that these assumptions are wrong... the detailed formal courses of library user education that have been developed by librarians in recent years.... are misconceived and should be abolished.

Lester's main objection is to the formal, class-based programmes of instruction which he believes divorce the learning of information skills from the learning of the subject that a student is studying. He is not objecting to one-to-one instruction in response to enquiries. David Peele, (1984) in discussing librarians as teachers, agrees that although students will 'learn' through the interaction with librarians generated by their enquiries, the divorce from that interaction created by formal classroom teaching is unacceptable. He concludes that rather than seeing education as a goal librarians aspire to, they should accept that '... what we [librarians] do at our desks is different to what they do at their lecterns.'

When you consider some of the justifications for user education it is difficult not to sympathise with Lester's and Peele's points of view. The major focus for much of the user education literature has been on the teaching and learning theory aspects, which can be fine in its own way but it can get out of hand. Cowley's paraphrase of the literature on method and rationale for user education digs a hole for itself:

Library courses might initially be designed to provide students with the "right" answer to a particular problem, but problem solving should be gradually supplemented by relativistic thinking which embraces contradictions, individual perceptions, points of view and analysis... students will gain practice in the art of determining the scope of a problem, understanding relationships and linkages and become involved in the evaluation of not only accuracy and currency but also appropriateness and perspective.

In tandem with this scenario are a number of writers urging us to adopt a sounder educational framework for user education. They argue that we should pursue ' terminal objectives ' and that these can be achieved through the agency of 'enabling objectives'; we should consider 'cognitive, conditioning and cybernetic perspectives ' for our learning methods or perhaps ' cognitive, affective and psychomotor goals' if we are to achieve success in our programmes. Somewhere at the end of all this complex jargon and textbook theory is a student who just wants to know how he or she can find the journal article needed to complete a project.

Some cynics, of course, argue that this preoccupation with teaching and learning theory is simply a transparent attempt to justify academic status, grading and credibility for some library staff in the belief that this will improve the standing and status of the library and its staff within the institution. With typically American cynicism David Peele puts the argument quite bluntly:

The familiar argument is that no one understands what we do or why it is professional... the image of the book-mad spinster whose chief thrill occurs each morning when she changes the date stamp is with us still. In order to obtain the status for our work that our pride demands it should have we must attach ourselves to a profession that is both respected and easy to understand. Everyone knows what teachers do.

Whilst the debate about academic status is no longer as intense as it once might have been, the preoccupation with the mechanics of user education rather than its benefit to the service and its users continues to obscure a genuine understanding of the contribution that user education can make. The very phrase user education is contributory to this problem, as Maurice Line was not too polite in recognising when he referred to it as: '...one of the less sensible terms invented by Librarians'.

Also guilty of contributory negligence is the argument that would have us believe that the only roles for user education are 'orientation and instruction'. Orientation may not be too bad, archaic, but probably relevant as it is, as long as it is not a panacea for a poorly organised service. An introduction to the location, range and staff responsible for the library support for new students and staff is a perfectly reasonable contribution that the library can make to enabling potential users to get their bearings. It is a concept that neither student nor librarian should have any problem with. Instruction, on the other hand, strikes the very pedagogic note that critics have seized on so eagerly when seeking to deny the potential for user education. The use of a term that so clearly implies a one way transaction with a skill being passively transmitted from the knowledgeable to the ignorant seems totally counterproductive when looking to justify user education by whatever name we call it and is wide open to the accusation from Line that user education '...conceals a certain contempt of users'.

Another myth that has done so much to undermine a positive assessment of the proper contribution of user education to library services and which needs to be exposed is that the process is designed to create independent library users who will not be a burden on the enquiry service, thus freeing the time of library staff for more important activities. For a start, what could be more important than working with and for individual users? Libraries are not supermarkets. It may well be acceptable to expect shoppers to find their way around around a supermarket without becoming a burden to the staff with constant requests for help, but not in libraries where neither the questions nor the answers come in standard tin shapes or convenient packet sizes. This is where Maurice Line's comments about poor organisation and guiding are relevant. We should be able to produce independent users to the extent that they can find their way from a reading list or a cataloguing reference to the item that they are seeking no matter where it is in the library. With adequate guiding and a layout designed with the interests of the user in mind, this should be achievable without reference to a member of library staff. But of course this is not the only use that staff and students make of a library. Very often, particularly later in their courses, students have more complex requirements: projects to develop from scratch without the benefit of a reading list; obscure references to trace because their project is obscure; the need to demonstrate awareness of basic, desk research methods. There is no point in believing that it is possible to solve all of these problems through a series of general purpose, free floating lectures at the beginning of the first year. And in any case, such sessions would not count as education any more than we would believe that we had been educated by the sales assistant who had answered our desperate request for directions to the baked beans.

So, although user education is still alive, it is not without its critics and in looking at where user education seems to have reached, it is important to recognise the validity of many of the criticisms that have been levelled at it by those commentators unconvinced that it has a useful role to play, in academic libraries. If we are going to identify a role for user education, the critique offered by these commentators offers some useful starting points from which to develop a positive idea of what role user education should play, especially if that role is going to be different from the pedagogic approach upon which much of that criticism is based.

Take, for example, the perception that user education is some sort of bolt-on optional extra that libraries indulge in when they have some spare capacity. Such comments, expressed by Line and reinforced by Cowley' s findings, are reminiscent of the debate in industry about design. For many, design is the pretty packaging that is tacked on at the end of the production process and which can, if necessary, be sacrificed in the interest of economy. There is, however, a growing realisation that people see design as an integral part of the product and a mark of its quality and as such will pay a premium for it. Similarly, if we believe, that user education is some form of optional extra we miss the point. The days when libraries were self- evidently a good thing just because they offered a repository for human knowledge are no longer with us, if indeed they ever were. Libraries have to struggle to achieve their credibility and the resources that go with it just as hard as anyone else. Part of that credibility is surely to achieve the most effective use by the greatest number of users. Properly managed, user education can be that part of our service that actually sells the rest of that service; that actively brings the sources and services that are available to the attention of those who most need them, rather than expecting our users somehow to absorb this information by osmosis as soon as they join the institution. This active exploitation of the distinctive services of libraries must be a surer way of building credibility and gaining resources than expecting our users to beat a path to our counters because of some atavistic sense that libraries are good for them.

Much of the criticism levelled at user education in the past has, as we have seen, been based on this pedagogic approach that sees user education almost exclusively in a teaching role and this has led to the preoccupation with teaching models, methods and skills. If, on the other hand, we adopted a different model in response to these criticisms we might at once get closer to a distinctive role for user education and deflect the criticisms. What if we adopted a commercial model of our function instead of a teaching model for example ? Our collections and our services could then be analogous to a firm's products or services which we had developed to meet the needs of a particular market place and users in that market place. How does the customer in the market place know what products a firm has to offer? How do they know what developments there have been? How do they know who to contact if they need help in selecting or using the product? At least one way is through a team of sales representatives whose role is not to manufacturer the product or service but simply to sell it in the market place. Rather than wait passively for the customer to come looking for this product or service, they will make sure that everyone who is a potential customer knows about what they have to offer. The representatives will sell goods or services to customers, encouraging existing customers to continue to buy them, whilst, at the same time, actively seeking new customers. In many ways this is a far better fit with what our subject staff should be doing than concentrating only on the teaching aspects. Like good sales representatives they will be keeping in touch with their customers in the schools and departments, noting their concerns and wishes for improvements and extensions to services and then looking for ways in which these wishes can be met. They will then be looking for ways to maximise the investment in these developments by offering them to new customers as they arrive each year or as a need develops during their study. As well as this monitoring role an element of the library representative's role is also likely to be similar to the group demonstration followed up by individual contact that is the stock in trade of many commercial representatives. Here, however, the classroom role is seen as integral to the library service as well as integral to the learning process and not an isolated outpost of the teaching function.

At the same time, this concern with academic credibility is just surely chasing phantoms. Why do we need to justify our status or achieve our credibility by stealing someone else's clothes? The library is an integral part of the learning process in academic institutions. If it is not used to the extent we feel it should then perhaps we should look at how we develop, market and deliver the services to our users rather than attempting to become part of the teaching process. Once we stop seeing user education as either some form of remedial process for ineffective library services and systems, or else as a tool for achieving academic respectability for the library service and its staff, perhaps we can begin to examine exactly what role the concept now called user education should play. We can begin to develop a set of distinctive competences for the library service, part of which will be communication, exploitation and perhaps even, in part, education. But we have to recognise that the classroom aspect of user education is just one of a portfolio of products that we offer our users. As Peele concludes, '...teaching is at best, only a part of what a part of the professional staff do a part of the time.'

Having said that, it is important to defend the teaching part of the role against some of its critics. Ray Lester's objection to user education is to the fact that it should be librarians who take it upon themselves to teach students about information sources. Quoting the Chemical Information Review Committee he argues that, 'One member of the teaching staff... should be responsible for the training of research students in information techniques and sources.'

His argument is that the literature of most subjects is indeed as complicated as librarians make out, but that it is this very complexity that makes it impossible for librarians to be experts in it. Hence the teaching of skills in the literature should be left to the subject experts. And again Lester is supported by Peele who argues that no matter how well the librarian might understand his or her subject area, '...knowledge of content does not mean that we are teaching it...'

Unfortunately, Lester's argument, whilst superficially sound enough, begins to come apart when confronted with reality in more than a few academic institutions. Far from being able to rely on literature specialists in teaching departments as Lester suggests, most librarians are more likely to recognise the model of the real life Principal Lecturer with a PhD in history who didn't know that Historical Abstracts existed, or the Course Leader of a course which emphasised independent group project work, much of it inevitably based in the library who, whispered to a librarian on a course validation visit, 'I didn't realise the range of material you had, I must come and look at it one day'. And for those who argue that these are isolated incidents occurrences they are confirmed by Cherry Harrop's research (Harrop 1982). In one, not untypical department, she found that,

Although staff in the economics department say they expect students to use the library, they also say that to pass first year economics students can manage by reading a textbook... Few economics tutors intentionally set work that involved use of books other than standard texts.

Far from the teaching staff being the fount of knowledge on information sources in their subject area they seem very often to rely on the very effective but very informal channels of communication that operate in many fields of research on a personal basis. Alternatively, they continue to rely on the single source that stood them in good stead when they did their research and continue to refer students to it despite the proliferation of new sources. And finally, despite the gradual move towards end user searching of databases, new researchers continue to turn up in libraries having been told, presumably by one of those experts in the subject's sources, to 'ask for an online search', knowing little about it other than it is supposed to be the answer to the researcher's prayer. If this is the way in which researchers learn about sources, what about the undergraduates or diploma students, or even many taught post-graduate students, for whom the informal channels are neither open nor appropriate?

If you have, on the one hand, an ever growing literature some of which is collected in your academic library, and on the other, students needing to make use of that literature but only receiving limited support from teaching staff who present them with a reading list of a couple of items constantly on loan, what is wrong with the Academic Liaison Librarian acting as the broker or interface between the user with a need and the literature needing to be used. This is where we should be starting to develop the distinctive competences of the service a library has to offer. Lester may be correct that librarians will not have an in depth knowledge of some areas of teaching, but they will have, or ought to have, a detailed knowledge of the resources that their library or their subject area has to offer, indeed it is difficult to imagine what else professional staff should be devoting their time to if not the effective exploitation of the collection. If the reality is that teaching staff see their role as simply teaching and adopt a comparatively cavalier attitude toward their students' use of the library, librarians should view this as an opportunity to develop and offer information services that are demonstrably of value to users. Amongst these must surely be methodologies for coping with the sheer scale of library provision as part of their learning experience. If we concentrate on what information skills the user needs in order to get through their programme of study rather than on what we need to tell them to compensate for badly organised and poorly guided collections, or what in our enthusiasm for our subject we have decided they should know, we will begin to develop an approach to helping, even educating, our user that combines specific requirements of a customer with the unique selling proposition of a supplier. No matter how user friendly we continue to make our services, this can do little to compensate for the fact that libraries can be and often are intimidating places because of their sheer size and range of services. Each user will often only require a quite small part of seemingly vast collections and the key to finding this small and constantly changing but vital information are the librarians who are equally familiar with the potential of the collection and the requirements of the users. If we focus user education in this way we will be fulfilling a role that, for all Lester's assertion to the contrary, should be fulfilled by a library service.

Lester would argue that this kind of need can and should be met by the kind of informal one-to-one contact that he supports and Line would say that this is the sort of role that should be filled by his "information officers". Both of them may be right, up to a point, but in agreeing with many of the criticisms heaped upon the classroom approach to user education, it is important not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Information skills are increasingly being seen as important as the skills and competences movement develops. Elements of information skills are now in the National Curriculum and the increasingly rapid move towards transferable skills elements on some higher education courses mean that many courses do include information skills elements developed and delivered by librarians. At the same time, it is difficult to see how student centred or resource based learning can develop without the expectation of students making more sophisticated use of library resources than hitherto and with this must come some element of guidance from those most familiar with the collection and what it has to offer.

The one-to-one approach, though, can only go so far in achieving this. When confronted by the size of cohorts currently typical of higher education, for example, classroom based teaching of information skills does have a role. Why have to provide an introduction to the best sources in any subject to dozens of individual students, as the information officer has to do, when we already have the very effective classroom model of communication to show us how to get a message across to large numbers of people? And just because we use this approach it does not mean that we are teachers . The commercial analogy of the group demonstration of a new product or service to potential customers that can then be followed up by individual enquiries and customised responses by the supplier is still appropriate here. Using the classroom is simply employing the most cost-effective means of bringing information that our users will want to a wide audience. The trick is to ensure that the content of that classroom session is suitable for student consumption. We have to be honest and admit that no matter how useful these are going to be to our users, the mechanics of information skills can be a little dull. An essential part of making such presentations bearable to both user and presenter is the awareness that the content will have immediate practical benefit.

In areas where a classroom based approach has been properly co-ordinated within a wider teaching programme there are examples that illustrate the credibility of this competence based approach by emphasising the immediate value of information sources. In some postgraduate courses in management and particularly in marketing, the teaching staff have been happy and even anxious to involve library staff in teaching the desk research elements of their programme because they have recognised that monitoring the proliferation of sources is an appropriate function of the library service and that sharing this information is part of that function. In a project that can only be successfully completed by using library resources, the immediate benefit is obvious and credibility and interest not a problem. In such a context where the rest of the course is classroom based it seems pointless to search for alternative methods of delivery. For a few the classroom session may seem pointless, for some the session will have been sufficient to enable them to complete their project unaided and for others it will be a trigger to seek further help on an individual basis.

The problem with user education has been not so much the use of a pedagogic approach but using it badly and using it in isolation as an end in itself rather than as a means to the more important end of helping the user by offering a service that he or she needs. Perhaps too much emphasis has been given to the 'programme of library instruction" approach; the six-week-one-hour-guide to all you need to know about the literature followed by the "library exercise', a sort of bibliographic trivial pursuit. This usually comes somewhere near the start of the term, bears little relationship to other parts of the course and has little support from teaching staff. It is an approach that critics like Lester quite rightly reject. The development of these kind of programmes seems to have more to do with our proselytising assumption that information is good for students and that information skills are skills that they should be learning. This idea that information skills are skills for life is fine but for many students the immediate concern is not necessarily with the rest of their life but with the three years or so that they have to study and to gain their qualification. To be effective, any programme of instruction has got to fit in with the students' singular pursuit of that goal. Not enough attention seems to have been focused on information skills as mechanisms for enabling students to achieve this ultimate objective.

It ought to be obvious then, that as Lester and others argue, any teaching of information skills should be directly linked to and integrated with aspects of the course of study being pursued by the students. Yet here again the preoccupation with form rather than function has led some to believe that the Grail for user education should be the total integration of information skills programmes in to the course submission and fully timetabled hours instead of the more normal grace and favour approach of teaching staff. Too often this is likely to end in the kind of hermetically sealed package of sessions that the critics reject. If integration is to mean anything, it must surely mean integration of the library service into the academic life of the institution. The role of user education is to act as a bridge between the learning programmes of departments and their library needs, identifying the best ways for the service to meet those needs. In this context, whether or nor a particular programme reaches the academic respectability of a course submission, whilst laudable in itself, is less important than the recognition of the interdependence of learning and learning resources. What is important is to emphasise that the information skills should be seen as an integral part of a particular learning activity rather than just an integral part of a course.

In different subject areas, of course, the most appropriate information skills support that can be offered will be different. Some outline of the concept of literature searching and appropriate sources would beneficially be offered to postgraduate students embarking on a thesis or dissertation, whilst art or design students more familiar with their studios than the library might find an introduction to the catalogue and other basic sources more beneficial when confronted with an extended essay in the second year than in the more conventional first week of their course. Despite these potential differences it ought to be possible to establish some principles to guide this integration of information skills with the needs of students.

First of all, the idea that we need to equip students with a micro course in librarianship needs to be abandoned and for those who think that this doesn't happen, not so long ago, at a seminar on user education, people were developing programmes that looked just like that; a course in bibliographic theory from a Department of Library and Information Studies.

The core, indeed for many the only, user education is the induction session. This is the shop window opportunity to put the library and its wares on display and too often it is suffocated by the laudable but misguided desire to get in as much as possible about the library in 20 minutes. Instead, induction should be brief, light and welcoming. When you are worried about whether you will have a bed for the night, if your grant has arrived, or which disco you are going to tonight the arcane intricacies of Dewey will struggle to register. If there is the opportunity for a follow up session the detailed material can be dealt with then. If there isn't a follow up session why ruin the shop window you have by needlessly cluttering it? The sparsely filled but professionally thought-out high street shop window may not be so full of hidden wonders as the cluttered and haphazard window of the street comer enthusiast, but it will certainly do a better job of catching the eye of those really intent on what seem to be more pressing matters.

Whatever shape any subsequent sessions take, they should certainly avoid the grand bibliographic programme and instead be much more closely tailored to the needs of the students at that particular time. A first assignment, for example, is likely to be a useful opportunity to explain the basics of using the service; getting from the reading list to the material, finding alternatives, getting the best out of reservations, inter library loans etc. This information will have an immediate practical application in a way that the byzantine complexities of a citation index may not. These basics are probably enough for most students to get by on for a couple of years, but may be enriched by sessions on specific topics where students have been set individual or group projects and where more detailed searching is appropriate. The move toward group and self-directed work as an alternative to the impossibly large tutorial suggests that this an an area where the teachers need to find an alternative and the librarians' ability to offer a new approach may result in the kind of distinctive selling proposition that characterises the most successful products and services.

In both of these cases, choosing appropriately relevant examples as well as convincing delivery mechanisms will emphasise the relevance of what is being said. Spending some time developing worked examples or case studies that show the link between the sources and the material is just one way of being able to show the practical application of what can otherwise be a deathly theoretical presentation.

There are several good, if isolated, examples of this approach. Preparing science students to present research papers at a conference has been used as one excellent framework for bringing together desk research, practical work and a specific and practical objective to show the relationship between information and the real world. In business, where the use of case studies is an accepted and successful delivery mechanism, there ought to be endless examples of how much more valuable a range of information sources is, instead of a single, partisan, source, in developing a balanced picture of a company or sector. Westland, BCCI, Tate and Lyle v British Sugar and Guiness are just a few of the high profile companies where relying simply on the company report to analyse the companies fortunes would be very misleading indeed. Add to that a range of reports from independent press commentators, from market research reports and even government reports such as Monopolies and Mergers, all resulting from a structured approach to information gathering, would offer students a practical insight into how academic and real world analysis cannot be truly effective without an information skills dimension.

The real need for the kind of detailed bibliographic approach that often fills the standard user education programme is only likely to come with postgraduate courses or with the final year project that is common to so many undergraduate courses when students will be expected to apply authentic information skills. And it is probably only at this stage that an in depth familiarity with sources and skills is necessary. In both situations students are likely to be without the life support system of a structured reading list to direct their information searching so they will need to know how to conduct an effective search for information as well as how to use the information sources that they encounter. At this level, it is probably entirely appropriate to focus on both the methodology of the literature search as well as on details of using some of the more complex sources that have little relevance to users operating at different levels.

Finally, part of the user education activity has to be a tutorial role, working in specific subject areas with individual students or staff to solve their own particular information needs. No matter how carefully structured and delivered the classroom programme may be, there are still going to be those users who prefer to be guided through the maze rather than going off on their own. Maurice Line compared it to offering a choice for users; they can drive themselves or they can take a taxi. Either way we should be able to respond with a service that meets the individual need. The librarian will not be doing the searching for a student who is helped in this, but will have demonstrated again how a search can be conducted but with more opportunity for questions and diversions. Similarly the user can come back to discuss extensions or refinements of their needs as the project progresses. It may not look like the kind of classroom based user education that has taken so much criticism but is a vital part of the package of services that a library should be offering within the envelope that, in shorthand, can be called user education .

More importantly, this tutorial role is more than the role of the information officer that Line seems to envisage. The essential difference between a tutorial role within a wider user education framework is that here there is an opportunity to be pro-active instead of reactive. Used in conjunction with a classroom based introduction, the tutorial session can concentrate on solving the information problem rather than on explaining the mechanics of sources which will already have been dealt with. Moreover, through the agency of a classroom session, there is an excellent opportunity to bring the availability of such tutorial sessions to the attention of users. The information officer, or the enquiry service, on the other hand, has to wait in expectation of an enquiry bringing into play the undoubted subject and source expertise that they have to offer. Combining the classroom and tutorial services in this way provides an opportunity to sell the services that an individual has to offer to a wider audience than is available any other way. It is an opportunity to bring the competences of the services to the attention of those who can benefit most from using them and offer all of them the chance to use that service.

Effectively what we are doing is segmenting the market. Rather than making the assumption that we have to provide all our users with an identical set of essential life skills, we are recognising that different users will have different requirements of a library service at different times throughout their academic life and that our role is to develop productive responses to those requirements. By concentrating on what our users need at key points in their academic life cycle rather than on what we wish to provide for them in whatever slots we have available, we should be able to establish the role of user education not only as an integral part of the services that we offer but also as an integral part of the student learning experience. In other words, we will be defining the distinctive competence of the library service within the teaching and learning experience and identifying the key role that information skills have in shaping that role. No longer a bolt-on option, information skills are now central to the future role of libraries in higher education.

This idea of a portfolio of services that offers different options to different users at different times is in stark contrast to the monolithic approach that seems to have guided much of the thinking on user education. With the concentration on the teaching role model came the almost exclusive concentration on the classroom and on the grand bibliographic studies programme that some of us have been involved with and which still occur in some institutions. Such programmes, where they have developed, have enabled the concept of user education to flourish where it has struggled and even withered in other institutions. Because of this it would be quite wrong to be unnecessarily critical of the achievement of such programmes. On the other hand the problems and criticisms that have accompanied such initiatives suggest that what we should be moving towards is this portfolio of information services. A portfolio that combines the efficiencies of a classroom approach with the individual dimension of tutorial support and one-to-one assistance, all within a framework that emphasises the relevance to the user of the particular support that is available at different times. Such an approach should ensure that the success or failure of user education will be measured by and directly related to, the kind of library and information service that we offer and not judged as a surrogate solution for poor guiding, unhelpful organisation or hang-ups about academic credibility.

It may also help to remove one final, frequently quoted, barrier to progress towards the acceptance of user education. Stevenson argues that,

It is not enough for the student to be stimulated by the librarian to make use of the library. His (sic) teachers must provide him with experiences convincing him that using the library is a necessary and meaningful part of education. The attitude of teaching staff probably provides the greatest problem for the advancement and development of user education.

Stevenson' s answer is the kind of closer integration of user education with the teaching function that has already been referred to, but a better solution must be to provide a clear identity and role for the library and its services within the context of the learning experience of students. Part of this may be based upon information skills but it should also include the range of other distinct services that have been mentioned so far. The development of a portfolio of services that are of demonstrable benefit to students will be far more likely to create a favourable impression on lecturers than our attempts to simply mirror their own roles. Not only that, but it will also have the potential to appeal directly to the students themselves without the need to rely on the attitude of the teaching staff to promote library use. Distinct information support for specific stages of their learning programmes is an effective way of convincing students that libraries are no longer a repository of books but an active and responsive information service that can complement and even at times compensate for the provision made by lecturers.

If we continue to pursue the monolithic approach to user education it is likely to continue to find itself in the kind of 'Cinderella' role that Cowley's surveys suggest, prone at best to misunderstanding and at worst to disappear. Identifying a strategic role for it within the overall context of student needs and service provision might provide its practitioners and their supporters with realistic hope for its future.

One potential opportunity to establish this distinctive and crucial identity may be the very growth in demand led by the force-fed increase in student numbers dictated by the government that is placing such pressures on library managers. The response of the teaching community to this situation, apart from the inevitable (and probably justified) kneejerk opposition, has been to begin a rapidly developing debate about how to cope with the teaching of substantially increased student numbers. The PCFC sponsored project entitled 'Teaching more students' (Gibbs 1991) addresses many of these issues and it is gratifying to see that there are several references to the role that libraries can play in that debate. There are, however, not sufficient references to suggest that this golden opportunity is about to lay itself prostrate before our issue desks. It is rather another example of the kind of challenge or opportunity that we will need to embrace and work hard at developing if we wish to continue to successfully integrate the work of libraries and information services with that of the teaching and learning process that they serve. It is an opportunity to establish the concept of user education as a fundamental element in the range of services that we can offer our users.

In the PCFC volume on 'Problems and course design strategies' Graham Gibbs acknowledges several of the factors with which we are becoming depressingly familiar in our libraries, including:

• fewer books per student,
• students unable to afford books,
• narrower range of books,
• single copies of reference sources,

as well as recognising the problems that result from these factors:

• less reading and less relevant reading,
• narrower reading and more predictable essays,
• discouragement of reading and use of libraries.

Faced with this scenario Gibbs offers two strategies for dealing with the situation; a control strategy and an independence strategy. For these library resources problems, the independence strategy Gibbs suggests is to develop students' research skills enabling them to find more varied sources for themselves. An alternative is to develop more varied projects in collaboration with the library that make use of a wide range of sources within and beyond the students' own library. None of this, of course, is particularly new to those who have worked with user education, but this time it has the added value of being recognised by teachers as a valid part of the teaching and learning debate and being offered to teachers desperate for coping strategies as one possible answer. This is the good news. The bad news is that the control strategy suggested is to provide set books or learning packages and as Gibbs implicitly acknowledges, effectively ignore the library as a core resource. Gibbs concludes that most teachers will use a combination of these strategies and there is , also, no reason why the set texts and learning packages could not be developed in conjunction with library services. It is possible however, that the independence strategy offers a more attractive option for libraries. Provided, that is, that they are prepared to develop these outline ideas and sell them to teachers as a credible solution to the problems that they face. In another volume in the series Gibbs returns to the idea of the need for independent use of libraries as an alternative to formal teaching and specifically promotes the idea of equipping students with the information skills to make such a strategy work and offers a glimpse of the kind of activity that library services already meeting this challenge are involved in.

The growth in student numbers, the pressures on teachers as a result of this and the recognition of the enormous potential still to be realised within libraries as a genuine learning resource, have all created a situation where libraries almost unwittingly have found themselves with the opportunity to reclaim their position at the heart of the academic experience. As with so many opportunities, librarians at the highest level need to recognise it is there and what a potential it is. The debate is no longer just about bigger bookfunds or about better automated systems but about our vision of the role of the library in higher education and about how we manage that role when we have identified it. Information skills have now become just as important as the size and relevance of our collections or the quality of our management information systems. We are unlikely ever to have the resources to match this exponential increase in demand, if we continue to see demand as simply document supply, no matter how accurate our what-if projections. If, on the other hand we start to look at other ways of meeting demand then the more efficient exploitation of often under-used collections through better information skills is an attractive option. For all the talk about navigational tools for computer networks, little attention has been paid to the need for better navigational tools for traditional services. This is where the professional librarian has the skills to share with those who, more than ever, are left to fend for themselves in the information labyrinth and this is where the sharing of information skills becomes a crucial element in the services that we offer.

This combination of circumstances has provided an ideal opportunity for library managers to embrace a genuine strategic role for information skills; one that does not rely upon any spurious justification based upon aping teaching roles so that we can gain academic status, nor any proselytising about the universal benefits of information skills. Here is a scenario that potentially makes information skills crucial to the survival of library services and it is difficult to get more integrated or more strategic than that.

References

Cowley, J. and Hammond, N. (1987). Educating information users in universities, polytechnics and colleges. London, 1987.

Cowley, J.(1988). A survey of information skills teaching in UK higher education. London, British Library.

Fjallbrant, N. and Malley, I. (1984). User Education in Libraries, 2nd ed. London, London.

Gibbs, G. (1991). Teaching more students projects. London, SPCFC.

Harrop, C. (1982). The Information Needs of Undergraduates: Some Preliminary Findings. (CRUS News, no. 11, July)

Lester, R. (1979). Why educate the user? ASLIB Proceedings, 31,(8).

Line, M. (1983). Thoughts of a non-user, non-educator. In: Fox, P. and Malley I. eds. Third international conference on library user education. Loughborough.

Peele, D.(1984). Librarians as teachers: some reality mostly myth. Journal of Academic Librarianship. 10,(5).

Stevenson, M.B. (1977) The relationship of user education to other library services and faculty co-operation. In: Malley, I. ed. Educating the User. London, Library Association.