Bibliographic Research in Composition Studies. Vicki Byard
Also, as recently as 2004, in an essay entitled “Developing Faculty-Librarian Partnerships in Information Literacy,” Susan Carol Curzon coaches librarians on how to interest faculty in the need for student information literacy skills. She advises librarians to relate information literacy to critical thinking, which faculty value already; to discuss information literacy as a lifelong skill; to talk about how information literacy helps students succeed academically; to stress that information literacy is an essential skill in academic life; and to present faculty with data that assesses students’ current information literacy skills.
Perhaps the strongest argument for course-integrated bibliographic instruction is that it improves students’ academic work, as confirmed in an empirical study conducted by librarians David Kohl and Lizabeth Wilson. Based on their study’s data, Kohl and Wilson conclude that “bibliographic instruction taught as a cognitive strategy did increase the quality of student bibliographies to a statistically significant degree” (209). Although their study was published in 1986, prior to the ACRL’s rich articulation of information literacy I have cited above, their qualification that the approach must be “taught as a cognitive strategy” is fully consistent with more contemporary definitions of information literacy. The effectiveness of course-integrated information literacy can be deduced from their discussion of their conclusions:
The traditional, tool-specific approach does not seem as helpful as an approach that focuses on helping students develop a more complex, appropriate, and individualized research strategy for themselves. [ . . . ] If bibliographic instruction is to be effective, it needs to be recast into an approach that begins with the student’s research question rather than the library tool and that focuses on understanding how information is organized rather than simply explaining the mechanics of how to use library tools. (210).
My hope is that the bibliographic skills you learn from this book will not only help you to complete a specific assignment for a course in composition studies but will also increase your information literacy skills more generally, making you more equipped for any research endeavor you undertake.
For Writing and Discussion
1. In commenting on the ease of online bibliographic searches, librarian Ilene Rockman writes that it is easy for students to be “paralyzed by information overload” (1). Have you ever felt paralyzed by too much information when working on an academic assignment?
a. If you have felt paralyzed in this way, describe the experience. Then review the ACRL’s bulleted list of skills that characterize a person with information literacy, cited earlier in this chapter. Which of these skills do you think would most have helped you resolve this paralysis? How so?
b. If you cannot remember feeling paralyzed by information overload, describe any prior bibliographic instruction you have received that you think has helped you to avoid this experience. Then review the ACRL’s bulleted list of skills that characterize a person with information literacy, cited earlier in this chapter. Which of these skills are strengths you developed from your previous bibliographic instruction? Which of these skills do you still hope to improve?
2. Identify someone who has been employed as either a faculty member or an academic librarian for at least ten years. Informally interview this person about how technological developments in the last decade have changed the process they use when searching for academic sources. Summarize the person’s responses; then describe what this interview exercise has taught you about the merits and the limitations of bibliographic instruction.
The Need for Bibliographic Instruction in Composition Studies
We have just examined the need for bibliographic instruction in all academic disciplines; in this section we will examine why bibliographic instruction is particularly necessary in composition studies.
Although he was not the first to call for bibliographic rigor in composition studies, the person who is most often credited with initiating a demand for bibliographic resources in the discipline is Paul Bryant, 1973 chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the first to chair the CCCC Commission on a Bibliography for the Profession in 1981. In his keynote address as CCCC chair, entitled “A Brand New World Every Morning,” Bryant lamented that the teaching of composition at the time was notably ill-informed by earlier scholarship. Without an annual bibliography on teaching composition, wrote Bryant, the discipline was ahistorical, like a brand new world every morning, one that permitted “the repeated reinvention of the same pedagogical wheels” (30), which Bryant bluntly described as “wasteful and stupid, to say the least” (31). It is only through a greater awareness of work already done, he wrote, that the discipline can develop in ways that are “as linearly progressive as possible” (32).
Yet several characteristics make composition studies challenging for bibliographers to manage. According to Patrick Scott, who has written extensively about bibliographic problems in composition studies, one of the greatest challenges is the classification of subjects. Unlike scholarship about literature, which can be classified almost entirely using proper names, such as a literary work’s author or title, scholarship in composition studies must be classified by terminology that is often less fixed. Scott provides the example of someone researching how writers begin writing; the terms “pre-writing,” “invention” and “planning” have all been used to describe this stage of the writing process, yet conducting searches of these words would yield different results. Retrospective searches in composition studies can be difficult, writes Scott, because “even where older research had addressed similar or overlapping questions, the old indexes don’t use the expected new words, and a kind of bibliographical amnesia sets in” (“Bibliographical Problems” 169). In addition, Scott writes, what makes the retrieval of relevant sources by subject terms further challenging is that “compositionists tend to talk about more than one topic in an article, and to raise issues that cut across simple subject-categorization” (“Bibliographical Resources” 83).
Still another bibliographic difficulty Scott discusses is that of field demarcation. Scholarship in composition studies is often interdisciplinary, drawing on fields such as education, linguistics, speech communication, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and literary theory. This broad scope of potential inquiry makes it difficult for compilers of bibliographic resources in composition to determine which sources to include and which to exclude when indexing scholarship. Such ill-defined parameters for the discipline also leave researchers uncertain about how fully a subject has been searched when using the bibliographic resources in composition studies. As recently as 2006, librarian Daniel Coffey confirmed the interdisciplinary nature of composition scholarship when he analyzed the citations in a representative sample of the discipline’s core monographs and journals. Coffey concluded that “part of what makes composition scholars unique is that their research is not completely encapsulated within the disciplinary realm of the humanities” (162). Perhaps even more than students in traditional humanities disciplines, then, students of composition studies would benefit from a longstanding, comprehensive, user-friendly bibliography.
Unfortunately, the development of a thorough bibliography in composition studies is instead more recent and troubled. Patrick Scott, Paul Bryant, and Richard Haswell have all published historical accounts of the development of bibliographic resources for composition studies, and they all fault the discipline’s professional organizations for not developing a comprehensive annual bibliography for the discipline sooner. Scott writes that the sheer multitude of professional organizations in composition studies created a professional segmentation, hindering the commitment of a single organization to devote the money, staff, and resources to a large-scale bibliographic endeavor (“Bibliographical Problems” 172–173). Scott describes this lack of initiative on the part of professional organizations as “embarrassing” (“Bibliographical Resources” 82); Bryant’s criticism is equally unforgiving: “That neither the CCCC nor the NCTE saw fit by the mid-1980s to devote some of their considerable publication resources to such a clearly needed, basic professional tool as a comprehensive annual research bibliography when, during that same period, they found it possible to provide significant support to various political and social agendas is regrettable” (“No Longer” 144).
Although helpful volumes were available that offered an introduction to composition scholarship, these also