Connecting the Library to the College’s Mission

Friends of the Amherst College Library Newsletter, 33 (2006-2007): 8-9.

Recently the College adopted a formal mission statement.  While developing and ratifying this statement was driven by the requirements of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, which will review Amherst for reaccreditation this year, the process was taken very seriously by the faculty and trustees, and the result provides an excellent basis for examining and refining our vision for the library.

As we begin to turn serious attention to the College’s library facilities, it is important to recognize that our mission is not organizing and preserving information, facilitating scholarship, and providing an inviting -- perhaps even inspiring -- environment for work and study.  Those are key activities, certainly, but our central mission is education.  We must foster the love of inquiry and provide the foundation necessary for students, faculty and administrators to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information.

This sentence in the second paragraph of the College mission statement is perhaps its most important: “Working closely with faculty, staff and administrators dedicated to intellectual freedom and the highest standards of instruction in the liberal arts, Amherst undergraduates assume substantial responsibility for undertaking inquiry and for shaping their education within and beyond the curriculum.”

At Amherst, staff and administrators – among whom are librarians, archivists and other library staff – share responsibility with the faculty for instructing and guiding students.  The students in turn are expected to look beyond the classroom and the curriculum, actively exploring, analyzing, questioning.  It is hardly radical to suggest that the Amherst model could not succeed without an extraordinary library.

What do we know about student success?

Connection is crucial.  There is substantial evidence that both academic integration - the formal and informal interaction with the academic system – and social integration to the campus community are vital to student success.  First-generation and international students are significantly less likely than their peers to be engaged in the academic and social experiences associated with success in college, but all students are more likely to become involved when someone from the institution invites their involvement.

Collaboration and engagement foster connection as well as learning. Focused exploration, analysis, and evaluation of information driven by the learner (or collaborative work group) has a significant positive effect on critical thinking gains. Students who are more involved in learning, especially in collaboration with others, learn more and show greater levels of intellectual development. When shared learning is stressed, students form self-supporting groups that extend beyond a curricular connection.

Most college students lack the skills to evaluate information effectively.  Traditional college students usually approach their research without regard to the way the library organizes resources and are likely to find “proper” research methods unappealing.  At the same time, they acknowledge lacking the information skills necessary for sophisticated academic work. Only about half of all students are confident in their ability to find good information and about the same percentage admit to having difficulty in judging the quality and accuracy of what they do find.  Even at small, academically challenging liberal arts colleges only 40% of students say they frequently make judgments about the quality of the resources they use.

Effective information use correlates with success.  College students with stronger information skills read more, are more likely to make judgments about the quality of the information they obtain and, among liberal arts college students in particular, there is a strong correlation between the ability to effectively use the library and engaging in educationally purposeful activities such as discussing papers with faculty members. Studies at the secondary school level demonstrate that school library programs are the number one indicator of student success.  Even students in impoverished communities achieve when they have access to a good school library program.

There’s no magic bullet, however. There is little evidence that standard academic library “information literacy” programs directly contribute to building skills or to creating the kind of academic integration so important to student success. Students must perceive a campus-wide emphasis and librarians, faculty and student affairs professionals must innovate and truly collaborate.  The College’s commitment to students assuming responsibility for their own education and, from the final sentence of the mission statement “link[ing] learning with leadership,” is also a commitment to producing graduates who continue on the path of independent inquiry.  And it is the library’s mission to give them the tools they need.

References

George D. Kuh and Robert M. Gonyea, “The Role of the Academic Library in Promoting Student Engagement in Learning.” College and Research Libraries 64: 4 (July 2003), 256-82.

Mary Ratzer (2007). Student Achievement and School Libraries: Empirical Evidence from 19 State Studies 1992-2007. Capital Region BOCES School Library System, 2007.