Research and Library Skills: An Analysis and Interpretation

This study examines the source of misunderstandings between librarians and teaching faculty over the concepts of library use and of research, concluding that library skills and research skills, being predicated on divergent philosophies of information seeking, are essentially different things that can be, and usually are, learned in isolation from each other.It goes on to discuss some possible implications of these findings with regard to bibliographic instruction and to some other library policies.he concepts of library use and of research have generated much misunderstanding between teaching faculty and librarians.One hears librarians accuse faculty of not knowing how to use the library.The faculty often claim that librarians do not understand research.Part of the impetus toward library-use instruction, which shaded off first into "bibliographic" instruction, then into teaching students to do "research" iri the library, derives from the conviction that the faculty, not knowing how to use the library, are somehow incompetent in teaching their students how to do research properly.And some faculty complaints about the library derive in no small measure from their perception that, not understanding research, librarians end up organizing the library, its services, and its resources in terms of their own logic, not that of researchers.The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons for these divergent views in the hope of creating a clearer understanding among librarians of the teaching faculty, who to a considerable degree remain an unknown and unstudied quantity.For librarians, it seems, the reference search strategy they learned in library