Best Practices for Online Information-Literacy Courses.

Remote access to resources has become increasingly important in academic libraries, spurred largely by the growth of online education. Through bibliographic instruction (BI) courses, librarians must prepare both on-site and remote patrons in information literacy. Challenges exist for remote-user BI: among them are perceived characteristics of the typical “virtual patron” and limitations of current software and infrastructure. However, recent remote-patron BI models—stand-alone Web pages, video-based programs, and class-integrated electronic modules—offer librarians templates for future best practices. A large part of the challenge of the rise of electronic media in and as our classrooms has to do with our students’ skills in locating, evaluating, and using information. Often, online learning is hampered by students’ unfamiliarity with the “sea of text” that confronts them; they sometimes have difficulty in knowing how to find and utilize important information while screening out irrelevant data. At the same time, educators find themselves in the midst of a cultural shift toward a 24/7 information culture. Increasingly, one of the key questions for higher education is one of how to ensure that our students are successfully “information literate.” Since the early 1990s, when electronic databases and catalogs at major U.S. academic libraries became widely accessible via the Internet, remote access to resources has developed as an important issue in academic libraries, primarily because of the growth of online education and the increasing expectations of students to gain access to information without physically visiting the library. In 1992, Lizabeth Wilson foresaw a new role for librarians at the advent of electronic access: With [the] availability of telecommunication networks, an expanded computer hardware base, and an ever increasing number of online catalogs and databases available through remote access, an increasing number of users will become invisible users: . . . [who are] older than the typical on-site user . . . [and] occasional users with high expectations for service. (pp. 38-39)