Research agenda for library instruction and information literacy

Editor's note: The Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) made the following research agenda available in the February 2003 issue of College & Research Libraries News (Vol. 64, No. 2, pp. 108–113; reprinted with permission). Although this agenda has already been published, we believe it still merits reprinting, especially within the pages of an internationally focused research journal. The questions raised in ACRL's agenda indeed do deserve investigation, and the results of those investigations should appear in the scholarly literature. We encourage anyone who addresses those questions to first examine Developing Research & Communication Skills: Guidelines for Information Literacy in the Curriculum (Philadelphia, PA: Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 2003). This important report links information literacy with assessment and demonstrates the importance of that topic to an educational accreditation body. Furthermore, that linkage adds to (and rounds out) the research agenda. Clearly, information literacy as defined in that report is a topic of interest to anyone in education—higher education or other.