Introduction: critical issues for academic teaching librarians

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the landscape of academic librarianship has undergone significant transformation, with changes in technology, scholarly communication and publishing, models of educational delivery, student learning preferences and the re-imagined use of space contributing to a constantly shifting service paradigm, with a corresponding effect on the roles that academic librarians are required to fulfil. In this chapter, we discuss six critical issues that have been identified as especially influential in shaping the work environment and professional identity of academic teaching librarians. The critical issues include conceptions of literacy; new literacy frameworks; critical information literacy; social media and ‘fake news’; learning analytics; and e-research and datafied scholarship.

Conceptions of literacy: terminology and the academic teaching librarian

Personal reflection points

• ■ What terms do I currently use to describe my teaching work when explaining it to others? Why do I use those terms? Do I use different terms in different contexts?

• ■ For what reasons might I select one term over another?

• ■ Do names matter? Do the terms that I use to describe my teaching work have any effect on my teaching practice, or on how it is perceived by others?

• ■ What existing conceptualisations or perspectives of information literacy, digital literacy or other ‘literacies’ am I currently aware of?

• ■ What is my personal understanding of information and digital literacy, and how do I articulate it?

For 21st-century academic teaching librarians, the terms we use to describe our work carry history and power and convey important information about our role in the academy and society. At a time when competing ‘literacies’ seem to jostle for position with information literacy, Secker emphasised the importance of terminology in clearly delineating roles and responsibilities in relation to student learning in higher education, where she suggested that ‘whether we call it media and information literacy (UNESCO, 2015), metaliteracy (Jacobson and Mackey, 2013) or digital literacy, terminology matters because it helps academics, librarians, learning developers and learning technologists develop a shared understanding of their aims’ (Secker, 2018, 10).