Information literacy and libraries in university education

Abstract

Modern life brings many opportunities in general, but it also makes us face many challenges caused by rapid changes and progress. Information literacy today is not just about reading, writing and arithmetic, but rather a combination of knowledge, skills and habits which is to be used as a unified ability to properly employ modern technology on everyday basis in order to get the relevant data and to prevent avalanches of information to overwhelm the users. So, it is actually the ability to swim in the sea of information that overwhelms us, and to locate, organize, evaluate and use information we deem adequate in an effective manner. This knowledge is a requirement for easier information retrieval, and a part of general literacy and culture as well. That is the reason behind the involvement of education systems in the ongoing creation of the information society. Modern technology nowadays permeates all aspects of our lives determining the way we communicate, spend our free time, work. Since our needs keep changing, changes must be implemented into the process of education as well. Libraries have an important place in the development of information literacy at our faculty, and so they keep changing in accordance with social changes and the needs of its users. In this day and age when we have to cope with large amounts of information on a variety of media, it is a skill to know how to find a piece of information which actually suits one's purpose. We cannot even begin to imagine modern scientific research without the use of Internet, without information being available to us all through a number of services; in that sense, libraries and librarians represent a kind of bridge between information and its users. Libraries in the world are teaming up becoming large network systems in order to meet the needs of their users. The same happens in our country where, despite the crisis and the economic transition, the libraries are trying to catch up with the world. Our teaching methodology coordinates with the Bologna declaration, which presents the European guidelines for higher education reforms and underlines the importance of the information literacy. To illustrate that, we will present the examples of COBISS (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services) and KoBSON (Consortium for Coordinated Acquisition Serbia), their operational capabilities and browsing modes. Also, in this paper we will present the specifications of those subjects which being taught at the Department of Library and Information Sciences, Faculty of Philology Belgrade University, and which encompass the development of the information literacy as one of their teaching aims; in that context we shall also present the results of a survey we conducted among our fourth and fifth academic year students. In this study we wanted to explore what percentage of our students use modern technology as a learning resource.