Open AccessPerceptions of Medical Librarians Towards the Importance of Information Literacy Skills
Author(s) -
Midrar Ullah,
Kanwal Ameen
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
pakistan journal of information management and libraries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.184
H-Index - 7
ISSN - 2409-7462
DOI - 10.47657/201516724
Subject(s) - information literacy , medical education , private sector , information quality , perception , public sector , quality (philosophy) , likert scale , medical library , psychology , public relations , medicine , information system , nursing , political science , pedagogy , philosophy , developmental psychology , epistemology , neuroscience , law
The purpose of this study was to find out medical librarians' perceptions towards the importance of information literacy (IL) skills. A structured questionnaire, consisting of eight IL skills, was administered to the head librarians of all academic medical institutions in Pakistan. The respondents were asked to rate the importance of IL skills for their users on a 5-point Likert scale (1- Least important to 5-Most important). A total of 69 (60.5 %) usable questionnaires were returned out of 114 disseminated to the respondents. The IL skills about “accessing the needed information effectively and efficiently”, “identifying relevant, authoritative and reliable information sources”, “recognizing the need for information”, "verifying the relevance and quality of information sources” and “using information ethically and legally” got mean scores exceeding four from head librarians of both public and private sector medical institutions. However, IL skill "evaluating the information critically” received mean score less than four i.e., 3.94 from public sector medical librarians and IL skills "organizing information collected or generated in a logical way" and "using the selected information effectively to accomplish a specific task" although considered important but got lower mean scores (3.97 each) from private sector medical librarians. Respondents from both public and private sector medical institutions had considered all the eight IL skills important for their library users, meaning that library users must be adequately equipped with information competencies.