ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


124 /  C&RL News

Women’s History Month is March. Celebrate 
with this poster by Kiki ($25) and a Women's 
History Kit ($23.80) available from ALA. Call 
(800) 545-2433, press 8, for details.

ALA opts o u t o f D enver
In resp o n se to the passage o f C olorado’s 
Amendment 2, ALA’s Executive Board voted 
at its January 23 meeting in Denver not to hold 
ALA’s 1998 Midwinter Meeting in Denver and 
not to consider any site in Colorado as a future 
conference site for ALA or any of its units until 
such time as Amendment 2 is either overturned 
by the courts or repealed by the voters.

Amendment 2 prohibits the state or any of 
its subdivisions from adopting or enforcing any 
law or policy that provides anti-discrimination 
protection based on sexual orientation.

The majority of board members felt that this 
amendment permits discrimination which con­
flicts with ALA policies 54.17 and 54.3 sup­
porting equal employment opportunities for 
gay librarians and all workers regardless of race, 
color, creed, sex, age, physical or mental handi­
cap, individual lifestyle, or national origin.

S ta n fo rd  com pletes RECON
Stanford University Libraries has com pleted 
a ten-year retrospective conversion (RECON) 
project to convert virtually all of its main li­
brary card catalog records to machine-read- 
able form. At the beginning of the project 
nearly 900,000 items w ere not accessible o n ­
line.

Faculty support information literacy
Strong faculty support for information lit­

eracy skills was shown by a recent survey of 
faculty attitudes conducted at Dalhousie Uni­
versity in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Six hundred 
faculty in the humanities, social sciences, sci­
ences, medicine, law, and other professions 
were surveyed. Sixty-six percent responded 
to questions about their expectations of stu­
d en t library know ledge, attitudes tow ards 
librarian’s roles, priorities about teaching and 
information literacy, and the instructor’s use 
o f the library.

Preliminary analysis reveals that 84% agree 
that students should know how to do library 
research and 95% agree that it will be essen­
tial to students in later life that they are able 
to find information efficiently. In addition, 88% 
agree that librarians and faculty are partners 
in the educational process. Of particular in­
terest was the fact the 89% of those surveyed 
agreed that it should be a requirement of the

Baccalaureate degree that students know how 
to do library research.

These initial results argue that faculty place 
high value on information skills, a finding 
which tends to disagree with the perceptions 
of librarians. Further analysis may confirm that 
librarians can concentrate on overcoming the 
other obstacles that prevent the development 
of information-literate students without wor­
rying about negative faculty attitudes. These 
obstacles include lack of awareness of instruc­
tion programs, lack of available time in the 
curriculum, etc.

Additional correlations are planned in the 
study. These will include rank, discipline, and 
personal experience of the faculty member. 
Researchers are Elizabeth Frick, professor at 
the School of Library and Information Stud­
ies, and Fran Nowakowski, reference librar­
ian, Killam Library, Dalhousie University.— 
Fran Nowakowski, Dalhousie University