CJARL Meeting Notes – 10/10/08

Location: CJRLC Corporate Offices in Freehold, NJ.

In attendance (and in no particular order):
1. Amy Kearns Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative
2. Martin Crabtree Mercer County College
3. David Peterson Burlington County College
4. Gary Schmidt Ocean County College
5. Amy Clark Brookdale Community College
6. Carol Moroz Manchester Township High School
7. Valerie Tucci (via phone) The College of New Jersey
8. Jacqui DaCosta (via phone) The College of New Jersey
9. Susan Kadezabek

A note from the Chair:
Over the past year, Information Literacy (IL) has become a reoccurring—almost habitual—topic of discussion during group meetings. The conversations have always been highly engaging, thought-provoking, and stimulating. It has now evolved to the point that the group seeks to expand its scope to include input from High School Librarians as a means of more closely examining the issue and better enabling our understating of how IL is addressed at the pre-undergraduate level.

During a meeting with CJRLC’s Connie Paul and Amy Kearns in early summer 2008, CJARL member Amy Clark and I indicated the group’s current interest in IL and our desire to peruse collaboration with High School Librarians. Both Paul and Kearns have been highly supportive of our group and should be thanked for their tremendous insight, energy, and willingness to act as facilitators in support of our goals. During the meeting, Paul invited Clark and me to CJRLC’s Annual Executive Board meeting in August and encouraged us to pursue opportunities for collaborations (and further insight) there.

While attending that Executive Board meeting in August, I had the great fortune to meet Carol Moroz, the Librarian at Manchester Township High School. Carol expressed great interest in the group’s desire to collaborate with High School Librarians as a means of evaluating her school’s IL teaching curriculum and assessment strategy. Carol accepted my invitation to meet with us during our October meeting.

Given the presence of our distinguished guest, this month’s meeting was unique in so far as we dedicated our time exclusively to the subject of information literacy, thereby making the best use of our time. This was only the group’s fist salvo across the broadsides of collaboration between High School Librarians and Academic Librarians so the conversation tended to be fairly broad, focusing on how we can address the ever-widening divide that students must confront when the IL competencies that they acquired in High School come face-to-face with the expectations of their first year College Professors.

Bottom-up curriculum development and a lack of clearly communicated assignments on the part of teachers were cited as endemic problems at the High School level. The development of standardized assessment instruments to determine (and draw attention to the importance of) the IL competence of incoming freshmen were cited as goals that need to be addressed at the collegiate level.

One of the most interesting ancillary components to all of this, however, is that CJARL is hardly the only group in New Jersey that is currently having this conversation—and along these very same lines. The User Education Committee of the New Jersey Chapter of ACRL and the VALE Information Literacy Committee are both engaged in their own analysis. I encourage members of CJARL to get involved in these—and other—initiatives. I also invite committee members from other organizations to join our discussion group to hear some other voices on the issue. It’s all done in the name of further collaboration.

Respectfully submitted on Monday, October 13, 2008,

Gary Schmidt
Chair, CJARL
Ocean County College
Toms River, NJ

NEXT MEETING: December 12, 2008 10:00am-12:00pm at Ocean County College (Room L101D). Directions available at www.ocean.edu. Agenda to follow at a later date.

Chronicle arcticle: "Connecting Schools and Colleges"

In preparation for this Friday's meeting, I thought I'd share a recent article (dated: October 10, 2008) from The Chronicle of Higher Education that relates to student preparedness for undergraduate work.

"Connecting Schools and Colleges: More Rhetoric Than Reality"

Permalink: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i07/07a04001.htm