Threshold Concepts: A Pilot Project Sponsored by the Mansergh-Stuessy Fund for College Innovation: For Librarians

"Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning."

Handout from the 2015 Association of College and Research Libraries conference comparing our faculty-identified thresholds to the ACRL frames.

Members of an ACRL committee have been compiling an ongoing collection of resources in a Zotero group, including publications on information literacy and/or the framework and a list of "exemplars" - activities, courses, and mission statements. The committee's site has additional resources.

ACRL has competed and adopted a new Framework for Information Literacy after a long process of drafts and comments.The frames (or threshold concepts) it identifies are listed below.

Final Framework accepted February 2, 2015 

• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
• Information Creation as a Process
• Information Has Value
• Research as Inquiry
• Scholarship as Conversation
• Searching as Strategic Exploration

Donna Witek, "Metaliteracy and the New Draft ACRL IL Framework," Information Constellation

Meredith Farkas, "Getting into the Gray Areas With the Draft Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education," Information Wants to Be Free

Jacob S. Berg, "The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts," Beerbrarian 

Nicole Pagowsky, "Thoughts on ACRL's New Draft Framework for ILCSHE," Pumped Librarian

Andy Burkhardt, "New Framework for Information Literacy," Information Tyrannosaur

Barbara Fister, "On the Draft Framework for Information Literacy," Library Babel Fish

-- "The Information Literacy Standards/Framework Debate," Library Babel Fish

Troy Swanson, "The New Information Literacy Framework and James Madison," Tame the Web

Iris Jastram, "Responding to the Draft Information Literacy Standards/Framework," Pegasus Librarian

Lane Wilkinson, "The Problem With Threshold Concepts," Sense and Reference

Megan Oakleaf, "A Roadmap for Assessing Student Learning Using the New Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education" Journal of Academic Librarianship preprint.