A Professional Development and Information Literacy Integration into University Curriculum.

The academic librarians’ role is progressing from service provider to educator who are active contributors in curricular support in higher education. This paper is a part of PhD study aiming to know the professional development of library professionals and finding out status and prospects of information literacy (IL) integration in higher educational institutes. A structured questionnaire was developed to collect data from the universities of Pakistan. This research included all the university central libraries of higher educational institutes recognized by Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan. The response was received from 138 central libraries of HEC recognized institutes. The findings revealed that more than half of the library professionals have studied IL course during their LIS education and majority of the professional staff had attended workshops and seminar on IL during last two years. Further, majority of academic librarians have clarity regarding core concepts of information literacy instruction and 50% showed their interest in integrating IL instructions into the curriculum and developing online IL tutorials. The study revealed regarding the status of IL course that IL instruction was not integrated in majority of the universities as a credit course and normally the information literacy course was offered as noncredit course. The academic libraries suggested that IL course should be a credit bearing stand-alone course and should be integrated with main curriculum of higher educational institutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]