How writing experts understand information literacy: a message to academic librarians

Abstract

While academic librarians have been encouraged to collaborate with writing experts to improve students’ academic writing and research competence, their collaboration is perhaps far from satisfactory due to the lack of mutual understanding. This study, therefore, interviewed writing experts to investigate their understanding of information literacy as a basis for meaningful collaboration. Findings reveal that writing experts have a simple and rough understanding of information literacy, cannot explain information literacy as a scholarly construct, and highlight the textual dimension of information literacy. Based on these findings, I suggest formal communication of information literacy theories and co-development of a text-based rubric of information literacy.

Keywords:

• Information literacy
• academic writing
• academic librarians
• collaboration with writing experts

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my four participants and Dr. Miriam Matteson, Future Voices Column Editor of PSQ, for her comments on an early version of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was known to the author.

Ethics Declarations

This study has been approved by Research Committee – Panel on Research Ethics at University of Macau (No. SSHRE21-APP030-FAH).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chengyuan Yu

Chengyuan Yu, Ph.D. in Linguistics, is pursuing a second Ph.D. in Communication and Information (Human Information Behavior) at Kent State University. His research interests include information literacy in writing and language factors in human information behavior.