College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks (PDF)

College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks presents the results of an information literacy higher education benchmarking study. More than 110 colleges from the United States and Canada participated in the study; data is broken out by size and type of college, for public and private colleges, for US and Canadian colleges, and even by number of in-class instructional sessions given. Uniquely, this report also breaks out data separately at institutions at which librarians have faculty status, and at which those where they do not. The 175 page study presents an enormous wealth of often completely unique statistics, including data on: use of library personnel for instruction, instructional work load, change in number of presentations or classes, Assessment of skill level of students in the following areas: Boolean searching, evaluation of website information credibility, recognition of plagiarism, use of the online library catalog, use of search engines, use of periodicals databases, and use of eBook collections; frequency of issuing tests to assess student skills in Access, Excel, Word, Windows and other common programs, frequency of use of information literacy tests of various kinds for incoming freshmen and transferees; percentage of colleges that require an information and/or computer literacy test for graduation, means of performance assessment for information literacy and other library science instructors, use of librarian and instructor assessment forms; length of time spent in information literacy sessions, role of information literacy in student orientations and introductions, percentage of colleges that offer information literacy services through a distance learning student orientation and much much more.