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Master Teacher Workshop
Good for Business: Information Literacy and Your Students

March 21, 2007

Good for Business Powerpoint presentation

Information Literacy - Selected Bibliography

Business Information Literacy

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.” Available at http://www.ala.org/ACRL (accessed 27 February 2007).

Information literacy standards developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries.

California State University, San Luis Obispo. “Business – Information Competencies.”
Available at: http://www.lib.calpoly.edu/infocomp/specific_bs.html (accessed 8 September 2006).

A listing of competencies that Cal Poly has developed specific to business information literacy.

California State University, San Marcos. “Information Competence as a Student Learning Outcome: Developing Engaged Students in Business Disciplines.” Available at http://library.csusm.edu/departments/ilp/ilp_projects/buscomp/index.html (accessed 8 September 2006).

Information on a proposal for Cal State – San Marcos College of Business to incorporate the Standards for Information Literacy Competency into the learning outcomes for their students.

Cheuk, Bonnie. “Information Literacy in the Workplace Context: Issues, Best Practices and Challenges.” July 2002. White Paper prepared for UNESCO, the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, and the National Forum on Information Literacy, for use at the Information Literacy Meeting of Experts, Prague, The Czech Republic. Available at http://www.nclis.gov/libinter/infolitconf&meet/papers/cheuk-fullpaper.pdf (accessed 27 February 2007).

The author discusses why information literacy is an important skill in the workplace and gives nine examples of what the lack of information literacy skills cost businesses. Costs include an inability to recognize and use valuable information that the company has, inefficient uses of time, providing wrong or inappropriate information, and duplicative work. “…employees need to create, access, organize, use, evaluate, package, and present information for various purposes at work. There is a continuous cycle in the creation and the use of information in the work settings…yet, in the process of going through this cycle, we see a lot of inefficiencies, partly due to employees’ lack of information literacy skills.”

Ellis, Patricia and Maureen Beck. “Collaboration between the library and business faculty.” Academic Exchange Quarterly Vol 7, issue 1 (spring 2003). Available at http://www.rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/mo2294w3.htm (accessed 31 August 2006).

Details some of the benefits of collaboration between business librarian and business faculty.

Feldman, Susan. “The High Cost of Not Finding Information.” KM World (March 2004): 8-10.

Discusses the costs to business from a lack of information literacy in their workers. Examples of how missing or incomplete information can damage projects. In 2001, a Johns Hopkins research project volunteer died when given hexamethonium to inhale. Researchers had looked on PubMed and the web to find out if there were adverse effects associated with its use. They didn’t know PubMed only goes back to 1966 – the research was done in the 1950’s. “Information disasters are caused not by a lack of information, but rather by not connecting the right information to the right people at the right time.” (p. 10).

Hawes, Douglass K. “Information Literacy and the Business Schools.” Journal of Education for Business 70, no. 1 (Sep/Oct 1994): 54-62.

A discussion about what business faculty as well as AACSB are doing about information literacy. Call for business schools to integrate information literacy into their curriculum and the reasoning behind it.

Klusek, Louise and Jerry Bornstein. “Information Literacy Skills for Business Careers: Matching Skills to the Workplace.” Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship 11, no. 4 (2006): 3-21.

The authors examined the job profiles of 21 business and finance occupations in the Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network [a database that describes the job requirements and worker characteristics of 956 occupations] to discover whether information literacy skills are valued in the workplace and are information literacy skills used on the job. The authors mapped information literacy concepts to the job requirements and found that overall information literacy skills are necessary.

Simmel, Leslie. “Building Your Value Story and Business Case: Observations from marketing faculty and (former) librarian perspective.” College and Research Library News 68, no.2 (Feb 2007): 88-91.

Marketing professor discusses how information literacy is of benefit to faculty, not just students. “I also benefited from these services – but in different ways [from the students]. IL instruction, briefing books (research guides), and consultations with the librarians helped me structure student assignments, come up to speed on industries, and identify relevant electronic resources. As a result, I became more productive and, I would argue, more effective as an instructor.” (p. 89)

Wu, Yuhfen Diana and Susan Lee Kendall. “Teaching faculty’s perspectives on business information literacy.” Reference Services Review (34), no 1: 86-96.

Results of a study of business faculty at San Jose State University. Integrated results of study into business writing class’s information literacy instruction and developed online tutorials and research tools.

 

Papers discussing integrated information literacy and examples of use

Avdjieva, Maria, Lisa Callagher, Charles Knight, and Lynne Mitchell. “Infolit: A “homegrown” information literacy initiative in a flexible e-learning environment.”

The authors embedded information literacy into a new core undergraduate business class based on evidence that effective information literacy requires cross- disciplinary integration. This paper discusses their experiences with this new first year course over 4 semesters. The final result was that the student’s core research skills improved and database use increased.

Boudreau, Signe and Tracy Bicknell-Holmes. “A model for strategic business instruction.” Research Strategies 19 (2003): 148-162.

This article discusses the collaboration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln among business faculty, composition faculty, and librarians integrating library research, writing, presentation, and team building. Discusses how assignments were reworked to incorporate information literacy to increase relevance of projects to students and student outcomes. They found that students overall used higher quality resources than in the past.

Cooney, Martha and Lorene Hiris. “Integrating information literacy and its assessment into a graduate business course: A collaborative framework.” Research Strategies 19 (2003): 213-232.

Details the author’s experience of incorporating information literacy into a graduate finance course and collaboration between library and faculty. Outlines the collaborative framework and provides a learning outcomes checklist.

Feast, Vicki. “Integration of Information Literacy Skills into Business Courses.” Reference Services Review 31, no. 1 (2003): 81-95.

Action plan with eight first year core business classes. Found that there was no difference between classes that received information literacy classes and control group. Numerous factors were identified as problems with integration of information literacy and instructor/teaching faculty. Author suggests embedded information literacy, however, should be continued to be explored.

Lombardo, Shawn V. and Cynthia E. Miree. “Caught in the web: The impact of library instruction on business student’s perceptions and use of print and online resources.” College & Research Libraries 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 6-21. Accessed online at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crljournal/backissues2003b/january031/lombardo.pdf.

Study to determine whether library instruction could impact business student’s attitudes and use of various information formats: print, databases, and web resources. After instruction, students were more favorable towards using print resources.

Long, Casey M. and Milind M. Shrikhande. “Improving Information-Seeking Behavior Among Business Majors.” Research Strategies (2007). Article in press.

The authors asked “how does formal information literacy training improve business student’s information seeking behavior as reflected in the quality and utilization of information in their term papers. An international finance class was analyzed over three semesters (grad and undergrad). The authors found significant improvements in the quality of the student’s papers. After the first semester, the author’s tweaked their instruction based on found additional improvements.

Roldan, Malu and Yuhfen Diana Wu. “Building Context-Based Library Instruction.” Journal of Education for Business (July/August 2004): 323-327.

Asked whether context-based instruction improves team-based research and writing. Found after information literacy instruction, that student’s use of high quality resources increased.

Windham, Carrie. “Getting Past Google: Perspectives on Information Literacy from the Millennial Mind.” EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Paper 3: September 2006. Accessed online at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3007.pdf.

The author, herself a member of the “Net Generation,” examines how today’s college students use the Internet to find information and explores gaps in their online skills. She discusses how faculty, librarians, and other academic administrators can work together to help students close those gaps.