The Intersection: Where Evidence Based Nursing and Information Literacy Meet

The Intersection: Where Evidence Based Nursing and Information Literacy Meet describes how the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework and Information literacy Competency Standards for Nursing mesh with nursing essentials, thus speaking to the information needs of nurses, nurse educators, and librarians who support worldwide nursing programs. In order to find the best evidence from studies, students and practicing nurses must be proficient in the entire range of information literacy skills. Though the references for this document are from U.S. organizations, they are applicable to nursing audiences across the globe.

• Describes how the ACRL Framework and Information Literacy Competency Standards for Nursing mesh with the essentials of nursing education and practice in evidence based nursing
• Speaks to the information needs of nurses, nurse educators and librarians who support nursing programs in the language of nursing
• Written by the authors for the ACRL Framework and Information Literacy Competency Standards for Nursing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jan 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780081012994

Book preview

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Introduction

Sue F. Phelps, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA, United States

This little book came about by way of another project that got completely out of control. In 2011 three members, Julie Planchon Wolf, Loree Hyde, and Sue Phelps, of the Health Sciences Interest Group (HSIG) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) began to discuss the possibility of writing an adaptation of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ILCSHE) (ACRL, 2000) that focused on nursing. Other disciplines represented in the membership of ACRL had done so, including the Science and Technology Section, from which the HSIG had been conceived. It looked like the task should be fairly straightforward and that health sciences librarians who worked with nurses or nursing students would find the document a useful tool in teaching information literacy for evidence-based practice.

Though there were many combined years of working with nurses and nursing students in the original group of librarians who took on the charge of writing the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Nursing (ILCSN), there was a strong feeling that the values of the nursing profession would be represented with accuracy in the final document. The authors looked to the accrediting bodies for nursing education programs in the, United States, the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission, Inc. and the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, for direction. The two bodies cited a number of documents in their accreditation documents but held in common the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s (AACN) Essentials of Professional Nursing Practice for four segments of nursing education. Though the AACN includes prelicensure nurses in their baccalaureate documnet they did not address the essentials of pre-licensure nursing singly so the librarians looked beyond the Essentials and found a document published by The Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Institute (QSEN) (Cronenwett et al., 2007) directed at education for that population. Pre-Licensure KSAS (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) outlined similar concepts to the Essentials documents designed specifically for prelicensure nurses. All documents included the need for skills for graduates consistent with information literacy.

Many other documents were consulted to assure that the Essentials and the KSAS were representative and inclusive as possible, one of which was the RCN Competencies: Finding, using, and managing information: Nursing, midwifery, health, and social care information literacy competencies (RCN, 2011). The Royal College of Nursing identifies information literacy in their professional values and in the competencies that they intend to support individual and nursing team’s thinking about information… (RCN, 2011, p. 4). The Royal College of Nursing is written for use in the United Kingdom but drew on competencies from Australian and, New Zealand information literacy framework: principles, standards, and practice (2004) which was derived from the ILCSHE (ACRL, 2000). These principles and concepts reach around the globe as evidence-based practice becomes the standard in health care.

Essential Competencies for Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing, 2nd Edition by Kathleen R Stevens was an inspiration for how the authors wished to approach their product. It is a simple table that delineates each competency with the expected skills for each level of education and practice for that competency. It seemed that the same could be written for the nursing essentials and their corresponding ILCSHE. This is where the project got out of control. The resulting document was an unwieldy spreadsheet that did not correspond to the format of any previously published ILCSHE published by ACRL. In fact, it was a document that was found hard to decipher by any of the librarians asked to preview the document. In the end, the ILCSN were written in the established style of the original ILCSHE and the behemoth spreadsheet was set aside.

During that time a couple of things happened. First, ACRL made some changes in the way they approached information literacy. Instead of a collection of the skill outcomes of the information literacy competency standards, they shifted to describing the threshold concepts acquired by those who are gaining literacy in information. This Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education was adopted in 2016 and the original ILCSHE have been rescinded. It is the opinion of the authors of this book that both the ACRL Framework and the ILCSN are compatible documents. They each offer valuable guidance for librarians and nurse educators in the greater concepts of information literacy and in the skills, knowledge, and progression of nursing education to navigate the world of health sciences information. Having learned that a spreadsheet could not convey everything the authors thought was important in their investigation of the nursing documents they were fortunate that, second, Elsevier agreed to publish their findings in the form of a small book. The following is a very brief description of the primary documents used herein.

The Information Literacy Competency Standards for Nursing are based on the original ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ACRL, 2000) which outline specific indicators that identify a student is information literate. It also provides a framework for assessing the information literate individual. It is a set of standards, with performance indicators for each standard and a set of outcomes that specify desired skills. The ILCSN are made specific to nursing through changed language and additional research processes, skills, and resources. They are written to address the progressive expectations for students at the associate, baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral levels and are in support of nursing students, faculty, and librarians in a nursing setting. They can also give administration and curriculum committees a clear understanding of competencies needed by nursing students (ACRL,