PNLA Quarterly, Vol. 62 No.4 Summer 1998

From the Editor
Making New Connections: The Electronic Information Trail

Among my early childhood memories are hours spent in the children's section of the Lockport Public Library, a splendid Carnegie-endowed landmark building on Main Street.... It is not an exaggeration to say that this handsome and well-stocked library - and by extension the American tradition of the free public library - made my life as a writer possible.

Joyce Carol Oates (Johnson 1998).

One second-level effect is that the Internet has become an information icon--an image or represenation of information on demand. We have all dealt with the library user who wanted their information from the Internet even though we had a print source immediately at hand. These are the changing patterns of society at work in our front yard. We must address these changing patterns of information retrieval preferably by leading them.

One aspect of addressing new resources is through instruction. Adalian et al (1997) discuss the changes library instruction needs to make to meet the changing mission of education from teaching to learning, a new paradigm described by Barr and Tagg (1995). The library is in the unique position of providing a hands-on learning laboratory for the integration of information literacy into the learning of its primary users, and the Internet can be an excellent focal point of that learning program. If our users believe that everything they need to know is available on the Web, then let's teach them how to search that resource effectively and evaluate their findings using the critical thinking skills essential with all information. Let's use this new technology to promote remote access and provide resources and links to valuable information for our users.

Instruction, outreach, and collaboration are key components to a library strategy that leads its users and is on the offensive. The library instruction literature is rich with examples of how to teach users to access, retrieve, and organize information in public, school, special, and academic libraries (Rader 1997). Most significantly, recent literature reflects the trend that librarians are forming partnerships to integrate electronic information and information literacy into curriculums and into the lifelong learning of their users.

Making new connections does not imply adding new behaviors to the same old, same old. To be effective, we need to transform the process into a fundamental change of how we work, interact, and think about our information resources. Although new technologies are initially utilized for their efficiency effects, the social implications are often profound. An example is electronic mail. While it provides an extremely efficient mechanism for communication, it has also revolutionized the way organizations and families interact and can be compared to the advent of the telephone as a replacement to the telegraph. To return to the quote by Joyce Carole Oates, Carnegie pioneered the free public library. Let us pioneer access along the electronic information trail.

Literature Cited

Barr, Robert B. and John Tagg. 1995. "From Teaching to Learning-A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education." Change, the Magazine for Higher Education 27(6):12-25.

Johnson, Greg. 1998. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. Dutton: NY.

Rader, Hannelore. 1997. "Library Instruction and Information Literacy-1996." Reference Services Review VOL(NO):103-118.

Sproull, Lee and Sara Kiesler. 1991. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization. MIT: Cambridge, MA.