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The question of how best to incorporate information literacy instruction into the academic curriculum has long been a leading concern of academic librarians. In recent years, this issue has grown beyond the boundaries of professional librarianship and has become a general concern regularly addresssed by classroom faculty, educational administrators, and even regional accrediting organizations and state legislatures. This essay reports on the success of a pilot program in course-integration information literacy instruction in the field of medieval studies. The author's experience with the "Engelond" project provides a model for the ways in which information literacy instruction can be effectively integrated into the academic curriculum, and for the ways in which a successful pilot program can both lead the way for further development of the general instructional program in an academic library, and serve as a springboard for future collaborative projects between classroom faculty and academic librarians.
In 1989 the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the proceedings of a conference on teaching and technology held near the Richmond, Indiana campus of Earlham College.1 Conference speakers identified a number of concerns for those involved in teaching and learning at the end of the twentieth century. Chief among these were recent advances in information technology that threatened "to leave students adrift in a sea of information." Earlham College librarian Evan I. Farber and his fellow speakers called upon conference attendees to develop new teaching strategies that would help students learn how to evaluate and make use of the "masses of information" now accessible to them through emergent information technologies, and to embrace a collaborative teaching model that would allow academic librarians and classroom faculty members to work together in developing instructional objectives appropriate to the information age.
The concerns expressed by these faculty and administrators for the information literacy skills of their students may have still seemed unusual to the general educational community in the late 1980s, but, as Behrens and Breivik have demonstrated, such concerns have been a leading issue for academic librarians for more than twenty years. According to its most popular definition, information literacy may be understood as "[the ability] to recognize when information is needed and . . . the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information."2 It has...