This document summarizes key points from a presentation about differences between information literacy in college versus the workplace. It discusses how information needs and contexts change depending on whether one is a student or employee. In college, problems tend to be more "tidy" while workplace problems are often "messier". The document also examines how information sources differ, with more emphasis on internal resources, communication, and less restriction on information types in the workplace. Barriers to transferring information literacy skills from school to work are explored, along with suggestions for more authentic learning experiences to help bridge the gap.

1. “The Real World”: Information in
the Workplace vs. Information in
College
Russell A. Hall, Penn State Behrend
LILAC Conference
Swansea, Wales
12 April 2017

2. Information Literacy
 Everyone here likely has their own working definition.
 The definitions might differ around the edges, but we
can probably all agree that the core is the same.

3. A Challenge
“[W]hile we continue to impose a
library-centric view on the information
literacy skills debate, we will find that
we continue to lack relevance to the
world outside librarianship.” (Lloyd, 2010)

4. Context Is Critical For Information Literacy
 Information needs change depending on context.
 Therefore, information literacy is different depending on context.
 What is the procedure for how we handle employee absences?
 Should I cite this academic journal article?
 What’s the best way to remove a tick from my dog?

5. Figure 1. “Fountain,” by M. Duchamp, 1916-1917
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marcel_Duchamp.jpg). Public domain.

6. Figure 2. “Fountain by Duchamp,” by FHKE, 2008 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_Museum_of_Modern_Art_(3023815215).jpg) CC BY-SA
2.0.

7. The ACRL Framework for IL in Higher Ed.
 Information Creation as a Process
 “Experts recognize that information creations are valued
differently in different contexts, such as academia or the
workplace.”
 Authority is Constructed and Contextual
 “Information resources reflect their creators’ expertise and
credibility, and are evaluated based on the information need
and the context in which the information will be used.”
(emphasis mine)

8. Workplace Information Literacy
 How do people use information in their daily work lives?
 Context is different from school
 Context is different from home / community
 Information needs will therefore be different

9. The Workplace IL Literature
 “The LIS profession tend to focus on the use of secondary
sources of information materials traditionally given access to
by the library. In the workplace, very little emphasis was
given to secondary sources of information and generally
members of the staff were dealing with primary data (names,
numbers, etc.) and not secondary information.” (Hepworth &
Smith, 2008)

10. The Workplace IL Literature (cont.)
 “[Interning students] indicate[d] a preference
for verbal over written sources of information,
where the process of learning how to be a
professionally competent social worker is
bound up with notions of professional identity
and enculturation into a community of
practice.” (Eyre, 2012)

11. Project Information Literacy
 “Participants most frequently discussed three challenges…
 An increased sense of urgency permeates the workplace
 Research tasks are assigned with little structure or direction
 Information seeking and use is highly contextual and fundamentally social” (Head,
et al., 2013)
 “[M]any called coworkers their go-to source, especially for learning how to
perform certain tasks they did not know how to do and how to avoid pitfalls.”
(Head, 2016)
 “After graduation they had come to realize those learning dispositions
[acquired in college] were transferable and critical to their success both as
employees and as lifelong learners” (Head, 2014)

12. This Project
 Interviewed 35 alumni of Penn State Behrend who graduated between 2009-
2014
 How do they use information at work?
 What information techniques/mindsets did they carry with them from
undergraduate into the workplace?
 How can we improve?
 Much of the workplace information literacy literature focuses on a specific
professions. I looked at a broader spectrum from a narrower base, searching for
commonalities (as well as differences), and how we might improve locally.

13. Types of Resources Used At Work
 Internal Sources
Figure 3. From “Email Campaign,” by JASE Group LLC, 2007 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jaselabs/3306827131) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
 External Sources
Figure 4. From “Google 2015 Logo,” by Google, Inc., 2015 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_2015_logo.svg). Copyright Google, Inc.

14. Internal Resources
 Co-workers / Communities of Practice / Boss
 Email!!!
 Reports (sales, marketing, etc.)
 Data internal to the organization (product info, labor stats, etc.)
 Policies and procedures

15. Internal Information Examples
 “There’s the operational database, […] which is where the operations and
sales teams, that’s their system where their entering all the customer data
and vendors we pay, any bills that we pay goes through there. And then
we also had a Oracle-based accounting system.” - Senior Financial Analyst
 “So we have a lot of templates on there [company intranet] or a lot of
documents that people have used for their projects.” – IT Specialist
 “[W]hen you leave college and go to the workplace, either the information will
exist internally and you have to find it or it doesn’t. You can’t just always Google,
right?” – Marketing Manager

16. Non-Textual Sources
Figure 5. From “Barack Obama Business Meeting in the Blue Room,” by White House, 2009
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_business_meeting_in_the_Blue_Room.jpg)

17. Non-Textual Sources
 Higher education tends to put a primacy on text, especially
scholarly literature.
 Not necessarily the case in the workplace
 Written documents are often important, but interpersonal
communication is key

18. Examples From Interviewees
 “So I would say a lot of verbal communication would be the main way that
I get information, share information, either that being email or sitting in
meetings.” – Accounts Payable Manager
 So trying to understand what the customer needed I usually ended up
asking peers in kind of concentric circles of, I guess you could say
authority. So I would ask my peers, if they didn’t understand I would ask a
senior member or a manager, and if they didn’t know usually we’d end up
setting up some kind of meeting or just a quick call with the client to get
that information. So at every point it was sort of an interpersonal
communication” – Software Consultant

19. More Interpersonal Examples
 “[…] the importance of reaching out. Whether that’s subject matter
experts or people that know something that you need to know. Don’t just
rely on someone reaching out to tell you or sometimes you just can’t rely
on Google or whatever search engine or books you can find. It’s really
important to know who has the answers and be able to get to them”
– IT Specialist
 “Talking with those coworkers, either one-on-one or in a meeting, saying
hey can you kind of bring me up to speed on what you mean by this or
what you’re looking for with this. […] trying to harvest the information
from them in a sense.”
- Student Affairs Administrator

20. External Sources
 Google results!!!
 Web sites
 Online forums
 Clients
 Vendors (spec sheets, instruction manuals, help databases, etc.)
 Media (including social media)
 Industry information (laws, regulations, standards, etc.)

21. Access to External Sources
 Interviewees sometimes talked about how they were limited not by their
employers demands, but rather what was available to them within budget
limits.
 “I’m not discounting it’s not important to use scholarly sources. Because I mean that’s
just as important but if you don’t have access to them after school. It was kind of what
limits it.” – Business Analyst
 “I think I’ve occasionally tried Google Scholar maybe, but we don’t really have access to
databases that are paid for.” - IT Specialist
 Some interviewees were limited to information resources
preferred/mandated by their organization.
 “[W]e have operations manuals and things like that, that pretty much the whole lab […]
we have approved references that we use” - Military Defense Engineer Trainer

22. External Information Examples
 “Google’s the best tool.” – IT Help Desk Associate
 “Just do like a Google search and a lot of times I’ll read, I know it’s not that
accurate sometimes, but usually a lot of times the first thing I do is if there’s a
Wikipedia entry on it and then there’s a lot of information online through
other vendors and other companies within the oil and gas industry.”
– Oil and Gas Drilling Supervisor
 “Also there’s a large community around this application that I pull upon that’s
unrelated to the vendor itself. It’s just users like myself and other companies
that share best practices and things like that. So a lot of the information
resources I use are online” - Information Program Manager

23. Types of Information Problems
 “Tidy” versus “Messy” information problems
 “The problems in the educational setting tend to be well defined. In the
workplace it may not always be obvious when, or even desirable to use
the procedure.” (Leberman, et al., 2006)
 Problems are well-bounded in school
 Use 3 peer-reviewed articles, no web sources, and at least one book other than your
textbook
 Problems at work tend to be open-ended
 Here’s the problem, go solve it

24. Tidy Information Problem
Figure 6. From “Model of an Alternating Tread Stair,” by Diomedis Spinellis, 2006
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Model_of_an_Alternating_Tread_Stair.jpg) CC BY-SA 3.0.

25. Messy Information Problem
Figure 7. From “Lego Messy Desk,” by Pascal, 2013 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lego_messy_desk.jpg) CC
BY 2.0.

26. Solved Information Problem
Figure 8. From “Twisted Lego Tower,” by Matt Mets, 2007
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/cibomahto/2133046822) CC BY-SA 2.0.

27.  “For the most part with undergraduate experience, it was
what was in the book.“ - Senior Data Engineer
 “[I]t was very, very strict that you had to get your information
from reputable sources, so from the library databases […] But
I really feel like it kind of limited your options a little bit on
what’s really out there and the differing opinions on things.”
– Business Analyst
Tidy Examples

28. Tidy Examples
 “Even in like the accounting classes even when you’re looking at financial
statements it wouldn’t be like, ‘ok here’s a 10-K, let’s look at it.” It was,
“ok, here’s this little section, here’s this balance sheet here, and oh here’s
the note that refers to this balance sheet,’ but it was never the full set of
data. So it was very limited in that capacity.” - Senior Credit Analyst
 “[U]nderstanding that as an educational institution you want to provide all
the information for your students to be successful but at times it feels like
if you keep giving the students all the information they need to succeed
they won’t know how to go looking for the information they need to
succeed.” - Maintenance Engineer

29.  “When you get in the real world, it’s completely
different. You don’t have a teacher there. You don’t
have book to read to figure out the answer. The answers
aren’t in the back of the book.”
- Payroll and Scheduling Supervisor
 “[…] when you head into the real world there are no more
filters. You’re not just kind of catering to what someone
wants based upon a syllabus.”
-Social Media Manager, Hunger Relief Agency
Messy Examples

30.  “I think everything is kind of a controlled environment in
school. […] don’t use Wikipedia. Don’t use this because it’s
not perfect. And then you get out into the workplace and
you’re expecting robust systems that are all perfect and just
make a click here and it does everything. But there’s a lot of
smaller companies that that’s just not even close to that. […] I
think you just used to looking up research reports on a
database and thinking yeah, everything is just there and it’s
right and it’s not usually the case.” - Senior Financial Analyst
Messy Examples

31. Transfer of Learning
 “[T]ransfer of learning occurs when prior-learned knowledge and skills
affect the way in which new knowledge and skills are learned and
performed.” (Leberman, et al., 2006)
 “[T]he success of the transfer depends on the similarity between the context
of training and testing (application), it is important for educators to know
what knowledge needs to be learned at school so it is useful later in life.”
(Leberman, et al., 2006)
 Two basic types of transfer (Schunk, D., 2004):
 Far Transfer (Decontextualized, little overlap)
 Near Transfer (Similar to original context, much overlap)

32. Transfer Problems for IL
 “In considering information literacy transfer, it appears that near
transfer may only be possible and demonstrable when the
information literacy practices as they are currently taught in an
educational context, transfer into educational contexts, i.e. through
different years of university education or from university or
discipline-oriented workplaces.” (Lloyd, 2010)
 How to mitigate this?

33. Authentic Learning
 Learning “experiences that reflect real-world ways of knowing and doing.
It is thought that such experiences allow learners to transfer knowledge
from formal education to practice, and so provide opportunities for
meaningful learning.” (Bennett, et al., 2002)
 Work with faculty to make innovative assignments that simulate workplace research
 Problem-based learning
 Engaged scholarship (including partnering with the community organizations and local
business)
 Other types of experiential learning
 Multiple “correct” outcomes. The important thing is the learning process,
not the “textbook answer.”

34.  “[H]e just told us that this is what happens when you do it and this is what
they do and that kind of thing but I never put two and two together like why
would you do that? What are you trying to accomplish? […] I feel like my
entire education lacked that connection of what we were doing this for”
- Biomedical Lab Technician
 “[B]asically most information would be from the book. The main thing that I
didn’t necessarily like about my program was just more so that, yes I learned a
lot, yes I had a lot of information that was thrown at me but I never really
understood how it was applicable to the real world”
– Senior Data Engineer
Not Authentic Learning

35.  “[O]ne of my favorite classes was my marketing analysis and my business
simulation class I had my last few semesters. Because it was more of a
real world feel. You were in a group. You were working with people. You
weren’t by yourself. And you had like an actual product that you had to
market and you had to sell and you had to run data analysis on it. So I
think more of those types of classes first and then, how do you obtain that
information basically would be more helpful.”
- Payroll and Scheduling Supervisor
 “You either were the baseball player or the ball park organization. And you
had to arbitrate the person’s salary. And how the salary was developed, it
was super interesting. And it was, you learned about, you learned so
much through that process that if you just tried to teach it out of a book it
probably wouldn’t have been half as interesting.” – Accounting Auditor
Authentic Learning

36. The Rub
 Likely need a foundation to scaffold authentic learning on top of.
 “I think people learn more if you give an example or they’ll remember a
specific situation more likely that a general question about accounting or
economics or whatever. So I think that if more of education was based on
real-world situations that would probably be more useful in your working
life. But then by the other side of that is you have to learn the foundation
somewhere. You can’t learn that through a real-world example…you’re
kind of stuck just teaching it by the book.” – Accounting Auditor

37. How To Improve?
 Partner with faculty to make upper-level course research similar to a
workplace information environment
 Authentic learning
 Keep stressing the academic information environment in the underclass
years
 It is their context for the next few years
 More group work to foster interpersonal communication and collaboration
 Teach advanced uses of Google and other non-subscription resources

38. Questions?

39. References
Association of College & Research Libraries. (2016). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Retrieved July 15, 2016, from
http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework
Bennett, S., Harper, B., & Hedberg, J. (2002). Designing real life cases to support authentic design activities. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 18(1), 1-12.
Eyre, J. (2012). Context and learning: the value and limits of library-based information literacy teaching. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 29(4), 344–348.
http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2012.00999.x
Head, A. J. (2014). Project Information Literacy’s lifelong learning study: Phase one: Interviews with recent graduates research brief. Retrieved July 15, 2016 from
http://www.projectinfolit.org/publications.html
Head, A. J. (2016). Staying smart: How today’s graduates continue to learn once they complete college. Retrieved July 15, 2016 from
http://www.projectinfolit.org/publications.html
Head, A. J., Van Hoeck, M., Eschler, J., & Fullerton, S. (2013). What information competencies matter in today’s workplace? Library and Information Research, 37(114), 74–104.

40. References, Continued
Hepworth, M., & Smith, M. (2008). Workplace information literacy for administrative staff in HE. Retrieved from https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace/handle/2134/3723
Leberman, S. (2006). The transfer of learning: participants’ perspectives of adult education and training. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Gower.
Lloyd, A. (2010). Information literacy landscapes: information literacy in education, workplace and everyday contexts. Oxford: Chandos Publishing.
Schunk, D. (2004). Learning theories: An educational perspective (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.