Abstract

For over a decade, hundreds and thousands of researches have been made to initialize information literacy programs and leverage information literacy instructions. Facing up to the new information explosion in the digital age, many academic institutes of higher learning around the world have launched diverse information literacy programs to promote essential knowledge and skills for critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving. However, many undergraduate students, especially the first-year undergraduate students, still have a lot of difficulty in accessing, locating, processing, and transforming key information effectively and efficiently. They are often confused by heterogeneous data and information exchanged and shared from disparate resources across multiple applications, formats, networks, platforms, and systems. Therefore, it is high time for academic administrators, executives, faculty, instructors, librarians, scholars, and other professionals to carefully review their existing academic information literacy programs and find out how they can successfully reach their objectives via deliberately designed teaching models. From the observation in a typical American academic institute of higher learning, this paper explores key issues how to leverage academic information literacy instructions in the digital age. Based on the definition of information literacy and the guideline of information literacy instruction set by the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries (ACRL) in the United States, this paper suggests practical approaches to promote academic information literacy instructions in service-oriented and student-centered academic interactive learning environments.