I’ve been reading and listening to the discussions about Transliteracy, and last week went to a one-day conference on the topic. And I’ve come to a conclusion. “Transliteracy” is what people who’ve been doing Bibliographic Instruction and calling it Information Literacy have started calling Information Literacy now that they’re finally on board with Information Literacy’s goals.

Generalization? Admittedly. But try as I might, I can’t see how aiming for transferable skills is any different from what we’ve been doing for years.

Here’s how I see it. Years ago, library instruction was called “Bibliographic Instruction.” Typically, when people think of Bibliographic Instruction, they think of librarians teaching students “here is how you use an index, and here are the 4 best indexes for your topic, and here is the library catalog and here are the important parts of the library catalog.” Typically, people think of it as being very much about teaching the few, finite ways to find sources.

Then about 20 years ago a bunch of us said “enough of this, let’s do Information Literacy, which is about teaching students how to recognize that they need information, find it, evaluate it, and use it well. And we want them to grapple with the politics of information production and publication, and we want them to be able to apply these skills to all kinds of tasks. We want them learn to be life-long learners!” Now, some people were more on board with this than others, so some people or institutions have really continued to do something much closer to Bibliographic Instruction while adopting the name Information Literacy. Meanwhile, other people have almost entirely dispensed with teaching specific databases and catalogs in favor of teaching concepts and processes. And, of course, there’s everything in between.

Then last year or the year before, some people coined the term Transliteracy, which focuses on transferable skills and (they say) does this rather than teaching tools. I contend, however, that Information Literacy was never primarily about teaching the tools and always about transferable skills. Telling me that I should stop doing that stuffy old Information Literacy, with its emphasis on where exactly to click in which databases, tells me that you never really understood Information Literacy in the first place. It’s not called Database Literacy for a reason, you know.

I was complaining to some friends about a propensity for articles in the scholarly literature of librarianship to include a “literature review” which mostly consists of “A search of x database on the query [insert query here] revealed y results.” As I said to my friends, THIS IS NOT A LITERATURE REVIEW. And one friend responded that this is what you do but should not be what you report. At which point something clicked for me.

A lot of what I find frustrating about some of the expectations that float across our professional lives has to do with confusing process for product. The stereotype of boring library instruction, all about exactly where to click in order to be a good researcher, is one of these. The assumption that good organization equals good customer service is another. And let’s not forget collaboration and curricular integration equalling library success.

And this thing with the literature review is incredibly tied in with issues I’ve been working through in my teaching, where “teach students about literature reviews” is partially about locating and accessing sources but a lot more about understanding why you’re even doing that in the first place and then constructing a claim that’s grounded in those sources but reaches beyond them. Quantifying results is only one of many many evaluative actions, and it’s only good for certain kinds of arguments, and even then it’s usually the least interesting and least informative option.

I had a great conference at ACRL 2011. And as normally happens to me at a conference, this conference developed a theme organically for me as pieces and parts of different sessions stood out and grabbed my attention — a bright shining thread spun itself out of the various sessions and strung itself through the conversations and presentations and plans. What wasn’t so normal for me about this organic theme is that it aligned with the conference’s publicly stated slogan: A Declaration of Interdependence. I normally pay little attention to slogans, so I admit being a little peeved when I had a moment of insight and then realized that ACRL had predicted it. I felt kind of like I had invented the solution to 2+2 and then been told, “Yeah, that was the point of arithmetic, silly.” But regardless, there was that shining thread materializing in front of me: interdependence is the key — it might solve everything.

Here’s how I arrived there in three chronological steps.

1. I attended a session about developing collaborations with campus faculty, and the whole session revolved around this sense that faculty were somehow a problem to be solved. The conversation revolved around librarians feeling misunderstood and begging for recognition as professionals. It did not, however, tell me much about collaborative relationships. It left me feeling a little sad.
2. Then I went to a session about developing our own communities of practice (presented by my new librarian crush, Char Booth). This conversation encouraged us to foster and revel in our communities of practice, appreciating them for what they are and constantly honing our practice. And this session said a whole lot about vibrant and collaborative relationships, their power, and how each piece of the collaboration strengthens the whole and strengthens the individual.
3. Then came the Raj Patel keynote about the vast interdependent networks of variables that determine how things work in our world — farming, household labor, environment, policy, production, and culture all contribute to the price of a hamburger, for example. He pointed out that the Tea Party (no, not that Tea Party, the original one) hadn’t been about overthrowing the East India Company, but about “negotiating interdependence from a position of power” (a phrase I just love). No one thing works by itself, and things working together in a system are strong as a system specifically because the parts are different but working together.

And so there I was, inventing 2+2, and realizing that our systemic insecurity about our roles on our campuses and even amongst our colleagues could be one of the things that’s preventing us from really participating in this ecosystem as fully as we might. We could be just as guilty as anyone else of not appreciating the role we do or could play in that interdependent environment, so we’re trying to say “We’re like you trees in all these important ways, so value us” when in fact the trees depend on us birds to distribute their seeds and we depend on their fruit and their branches. We’re not negotiating our interdependence from a position of power, and so we’re dependent (resonance with the Big Deal, anyone?). Strength, freedom, and self-assurance lie in interdependence.