First-Ever Info Literacy Standards Due This Summer

Staff -- School Library Journal, 5/1/1998

A teacher in your school is concerned that his students won't fully understand the importance of building the Great Pyramid in ancient Egypt. But if he collaborated with you, the library media specialist, and classroom teachers, students might have a better shot at understanding it.

That's the hope of a forthcoming publication called "Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning" to be released this summer by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association, and its partner, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).

The nine K-12 standards aim to identify student benchmarks for information literacy, including the ability to search for information efficiently and think about it critically, and understand concepts related to information, such as intellectual property. A draft of the document is available at www.ala.org/aasl/stndsdrft5.html.

The student standards will be published together with updated guidelines for library media centers in one publication called Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning (ALA, 1998). The standards may also be purchased separately to give to administrators, school boards, and other interested parties.

AASL and AECT clashed on the final form of the library media center guidelines (see News, March, p. 87 and April, p. 14), resulting in missed deadlines, but the student standards did not suffer the same fate. The book's publisher, ALA Editions, expects Information Power to be released on schedule at ALA's Annual Conference in late June.