First, we believe that research is a valuable experience for undergraduates.¹ Research, even at a rudimentary level, demands critical thinking, reading, composing, and the formation of independent judgment. Research experiences-whether simple problem-solving tasks or more complex data-gathering and analysis-give students a deeper understanding of how knowledge is formed and how conflicting ideas can be negotiated. When they do research they actively play a role in knowledge formation, and can come to "own" their knowledge more profoundly than if they learn more passively through lectures or textbooks. The researcher, in effect, becomes a collaborative participant in the construction of knowledge, not merely a consumer of information.

Second, we believe that research as an activity is situated within disciplinary frameworks, and so needs to be addressed in terms of specific research traditions.

Third, we believe that the research process is complex and recursive and involves not just finding information but framing and refining an appropriate question, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, interpreting material, and composing some kind of response. We need to bear in mind as we teach that research is a non-linear discovery process, not a set of discrete techniques.

Fourth, we believe that research skills, like writing skills, are developmental. They can't be mastered in a single library session but must be built upon and practiced, both throughout the entire process of a research project and through the course of a student's education.

And finally, we believe that the new technologies are offering more choices and more challenges, but the higher level skills employed in research are essentially the same whether you are using print or electronic resources. Too often instruction focuses on how the machine works or creates an artificial distinction between the medium and the information it contains. Though the researcher today must be able to use electronic tools, and know what is available and when it will be most useful, it is more important that he or she understands how these tools fit into the larger activity of research.

Librarians have expressed doubts about the effectiveness of traditional course related library instruction for many years. In 1990 Tom Eadie made the contentious claim that library instruction, as it is commonly practiced, is a waste of time because it "provides the answer before the question has arisen" (45). Earlier Stephen Stoan pointed out that the "research strategies" librarians teach bear little resemblance to the strategies used by researchers, but rather emulate librarians' methods for answering reference questions. Barbara Valentine described actual research strategies as being driven more by practical needs and a desire to finish a project quickly than by a sophisticated engagement with the process. In a similar vein Carol Kuhlthau, Constance Mellon and Barbara Fister have all found students' actual research practices differ significantly from the research strategies recommended by librarians, and all discovered that the process is more complex and less linear than generally acknowledged. In spite of good intentions, library instruction hasn't played the pivotal role it could; it is telling that a recent Boyer Commission report on Reinventing Undergraduate Education puts great emphasis on the need for research to be the focal point for undergraduate learning, but nowhere in the report are library instruction programs mentioned as a supporting player.

If anything, the need for successful instruction in research skills is greater than ever. The current hybrid print/electronic library offers more resources and more opportunities, but also poses more problems for the inexperienced researcher. Publishing is undergoing a revolution. The Web makes it possible for anyone to publish for a world-wide audience, and the need to evaluate sources and sort through a myriad of choices, always tricky for novice researchers, has become a pressing issue. Scientific, technical, and medical publishers are moving toward putting their periodicals online, making more available but the search process more variable. Libraries, once developed as collections tailored to local needs, are now increasingly a gateway to shared resources that offer more but are less closely attuned to the undergraduate's particular needs. A study conducted in 1997 by John Lubans found that college students still feel a need to use print as well as electronic resources and that many of them don't feel confident about their ability to find information effectively. A follow-up study of high school students suggested they are more likely to favor electronic resources but still need help finding quality resources. The plethora of electronic products and their variant interfaces make the mechanics of research more demanding. Discussions on such electronic forums as BI-L and COLLIB-L demonstrate that librarians everywhere are struggling with inventing new ways to focus on research processes rather than tools, a more pressing issue now that the tools have become more complex. Janet Martorana and Keith Gresham warn that electronic classrooms can actually work against good practice, leading instruction to focus on mechanics rather than transferable concepts. Just as the mechanics become more complex, the need for learning conceptual models that transcend those specifics grows more important.

A collaborative approach, embedding the learning of skills in the curriculum, is an alternative that many find attractive, but it is difficult to achieve. "Information literacy" has been touted by Patricia Senn Brievik, D.W. Farmer and others as a new approach that could ensure that students can identify information needs, and find, use and evaluate information, learning skills they can apply throughout their life time. But it requires that librarians establish stronger partnerships. Loanne Snavely and Natasha Cooper have analyzed the ways in which establishing an information literacy program might compete with other agendas in higher education, arguing that it can be successfully integrated into other goals. Some librarians argue that partnerships between libraries and computing organizations on campus focused on using technology in the curriculum can lead to fruitful alliances; the UWired project at the University of Washington is an exemplary model. Others, such as Jean Sheridan, feel that alliances with faculty in the disciplines are more crucial and point to writing-across-the-curriculum programs as a model that could be emulated by librarians seeking to embed research skills in the disciplines.

We feel that, while working with the academic computing staff is important, collaborations with faculty are the key to a successful research skills program. As is found on many campuses, our faculty value research as a learning experience for undergraduates, but have not examined what changes need to be made in the curriculum to integrate those experiences in a manner that successfully addresses students' developmental needs. Librarians here and elsewhere are finding that research skills are too important and too complex to be taught successfully through traditional, library-based means. We feel it is time for academic librarians to empower faculty to teach research skills holistically and in context, taking more responsibility for modeling the craft of research for student apprentices, just as the writing-across-the-curriculum placed the responsibility for writing instruction in the hands of faculty in the disciplines.

This project was developed out of focus group discussions with faculty and was defined by their statement of need. Faculty in a variety of disciplines, including art, English, foreign languages and communication studies, have expressed a strong interest in participating in the first summer program. We believe Gustavus Adolphus College, because of its long-standing instruction program, successful writing-across-the-curriculum experience, interest in assessment of student outcomes, and commitment to undergraduate research, is an ideal place to implement this model.

The library staff began to develop a strategic plan with an all staff retreat in May of 1997. We identified five areas of concern, and every member of the staff served on a committee to gather data and compile recommendations. A final report was completed in January 1998. The task of refiguring library services to adapt to the opportunities and challenges of new technologies emerged as the dominant theme, and we quickly identified support for hands-on instruction integrating print and electronic resources as a critical priority. As we approached the problem of teaching research skills effectively, we held a series of conversations with students and faculty to get a wider perspective on the issues involved. Out of those conversations this proposal began to evolve.

Faculty were most interested in opportunities for developing pedagogical support for research in the curriculum. They felt that technology wasn't the challenge, using it well was. They also felt strongly that distinctions often made between print and electronic texts were superficial; that the most intractable problems students faced when doing research had to do with understanding where knowledge comes from, evaluating sources, and knowing how to ask questions and frame answers in terms appropriate to scholarship in the disciplines, all issues that are not dependent on the format of information. Students recognized many of the same problems and wanted to have more effective and sustained help in learning how to do research, asking that help come from both librarians and faculty in terms that address both finding information and putting it to use effectively. In particular they found library workshops conducted by librarians to be of some help, but expressed a desire for faculty in the disciplines to be more involved in teaching research skills and they wanted those skills to be taught intensively across the entirety of a course, integrating the finding of information with problem formulation, evaluation, and use of sources in writing.

What we learned from these focus groups bore out some of our assumptions. Students need different kinds of help throughout the research process, they need to engage in real research tasks repeatedly throughout their college careers in order to master research skills, and classroom faculty need to be involved in teaching the different stages of the research process within the conventions of the disciplines. As a result of these findings and of our strategic planning process we built and furnished a new instruction lab in the library that can serve as a facility for faculty development, for the active learning that students report as more effective than traditional lecture and demonstration, and for guided practice in the critical evaluation of both electronic and print resources.

We also learned many people are interested in seeing that the college's research instruction efforts are improved. Though the library has a good instruction program-a 1994 external review of the library said it was "excellent in both quantity and quality"-it only scratches the surface. Our program, like most academic library programs, depends primarily on course-related sessions, tailored to class assignments, with the addition of first-year orientation tours and workshops and occasional credit courses. The typical class involves a 50-minute session in the library and includes, whenever possible, collaborative hands-on experience with research materials and an annotated resource guide. The course-related instruction model acknowledges that research skills are contextualized in disciplines and that learning will be most effective when tied to a genuine need, but it fails to address research skills developmentally-most library sessions occur only once in a semester and don't build sequentially on one another-and does not integrate finding information into the total research process because the brief session tends to focus on locating information, with only a nod toward how that information might ultimately be put to use. It seemed clear from our strategic planning process and our conversations with students and faculty that the concerns librarians, faculty, and students have about research instruction are convergent and would benefit from a stronger collaboration among librarians and the teaching faculty so that faculty would have an opportunity to design research instruction into their teaching.

1. We are using the word "research" in the broadest sense.  By that term we mean any activity that involves gathering and interpreting information in order to yield meaning, whether through original data gathering, synthesizing secondary material, laboratory work informed by previous published research, or any other form of inquiry that makes use of information.  This definition of the word embraces the multiple paradigms used in the academic disciplines as well as inquiry methods that satisfy information needs outside the academic disciplines.

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