Curricular Information Demand in Theological Degrees: Operationalizing a Key Concept for Library Services

Abstract

If seminary libraries exist to support student information needs, then librarians need specific knowledge about how a given school's curriculum shapes such needs. This article puts forward a model of the intended curriculum in master's-level theological education. Based on analysis of the intended theological curriculum (giving special attention to the use of student time), the author posits curricular information demand (CID) as a way to describe with precision how courses and degree programs expect students to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information. CID has a weaker measure based on analysis of syllabi and a stronger measure based on analysis of actual student work. The author presents examples of CID for courses at Austin Presbyterian Theological School. Finally, the author calls for research to analyze the usefulness of the model.

KEYWORDS:

• curricular information demand
• time management
• intended curriculum
• information seeking

Acknowledgments

This article was accepted under the editorship of Mark Stover.

© Timothy D. Lincoln

Notes

Regarding curriculum, I agree with social constructivism, the contention that human actors in groups come to agreement about “how it works” for us. I have taken the concept and phrasing of “what counts as X,” where X might be an Olympic gold medal, a marriage, or a good sermon, from Searle.

I have chosen the term “curricular information demand” in order to distinguish my usage from some other ways that the simpler terms “information density” and “information demand” have been used. For instance, Russell, Hendricson, and Herbert, in a study of memory retention, used information demand to refer to the intensity of detail in classroom lectures. In a bibliometric study of medical publications, Schuemie and colleagues found that abstracts of articles have a higher information density that the articles themselves, as measured by key-word frequency. In the field or organizational studies, two separate reports (Caldwell, Uang, and Taha; Westaway) used information demand to refer to the amount of information in highly specific communication contexts. Curricular information demand, as proposed here, relates “demand” to the perceived needs of students for reliable and authoritative documents pertinent to theological study.

The emphasis in this article is on ways that the curriculum pushes on students to find and use information. Clearly, this approach leaves out all curiosity-driven information use on the part of students. While theological librarians have heard many testimonies from former theological students about how access to a seminary library supported such research passions (and how the library exposed them to worlds of thought that were not covered in their school's curriculum), I know of no empirical studies that could estimate how wide spread is such use of library resources. This is a worthy line of research in its own right.

Of course, one can contest any scheme for categorization, as Bowker and Star note. Whether or not these categories are robust enough to help librarians do their work is an empirical question. The appropriate way to test my proposal is to conduct studies using the framework, analyze the data, then draw conclusions.

I am not arguing that each and every student completely complies with all faculty expectations. Rather, I am arguing that typical student behavior conforms to most perceived faculty expectations.

The median was 134 hours of engagement. Thus, the data set closely approximated a normal distribution.

In a field work course, the proportion of time use would be different because doing or observing ministry activities are the core of such courses.