CULTIVATING INFORMATION LITERACY EDUCATION AT A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY: ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS WORKING FOR STUDENT SUCCESS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Information literacy [IL] is a global higher education issue to educate university
students in acquiring information skills, and infrastructure a critical mindset for
professional development and challenges in this era. It is common for a university
library to serve as the centre for navigating students in utilising scholarly resources,
tools and systems, as well as providing research support to faculty members.
Meanwhile, university librarians can be good listeners to capture the urgent needs of
students and provide support to them, reduce information barriers and build dependent
relationships through long-term dialogues.
This research was conducted in a unique environment – a small private
university library in Macao, China. IL instruction began with four librarians in 2016
and recorded over 140 service hours per year, which presents the phenomenon that
university students have urgent needs to familiarise themselves with scholarly
resources or academic writing skills. The university librarians organise personal
tutorials and in-class workshops, either through general promotions or invitations from,
and encounter difficulties when requests come like snowflakes, particularly in 2018,
when the campus relocated and was divided into three separate campuses.
The researcher realised the importance of improving the teaching of information
literacy, either by reidentifying the value of instruction or looking for the opportunity
in career development, after long-term service in the library. However, the recent
research and literature are not able to satisfy the professional learning, as most studies
are conducted by large-scale university libraries and are challenging to reference in the
smaller academic settings with seven librarians.
This research aims to investigate the IL model for small-scale university
libraries, providing some reference materials for those intending to operate in similar
academic settings. In particular, it is increasingly common for non-teaching academic
librarians to contribute to research support services or multifaceted functions. For
instance, patron service integrates the loan service and reference service into one, which
means librarians have to be familiar with their scholarly resources and research methods
and provide navigation guidance to faculty and students in person. Therefore, librarians
are building their academic confidence through continuous teaching experiences and
user feedback. Adopting an action research framework, the librarian, as the researcher,
explores the effectiveness, challenges, and improvements of teaching IL and examines
how academic librarians contribute to university IL instruction in the digital age.
Three action cycles are completed in this research, including Cycle 1
Preliminary findings of the pilot study, Cycle 2 Strategic development with in-
depth interviews and surveys, and Cycle 3 Contextualising the IL instructional
strategy. The findings derive from interviewing enrolled students and current faculty
members and also from analysing the non-scale questionnaires answered by students.
After a comprehensive analysis, the researcher identifies parallel models for personal
tutorials and in-class workshops, while most users reflect their dependence on personal
relationships with librarians. Still, the self-learning service may provide accurate
navigation for students who wish to address problems independently. Moreover, the
research results demonstrate that the librarian's proactive and direct engagement can
help students and faculty members alleviate study and teaching anxiety. Additionally,
to foster collaboration in information literacy education, a novel collaborative model is
proposed, aiming to establish an open science platform for professional exchanges
among libraries, encompassing shared teaching resources and collaborative discussions.