Information literacy and engineering design: Developing an integrated conceptual model

Abstract

Engineering education is moving increasingly toward an active-learning based pedagogy. Traditionally relegated to a final-year design project, more and more engineering design projects are appearing earlier, even in the first-year of undergraduate education. With the increased frequency of these projects that are problems without a single ‘right’ answer, engineering librarians are finding more opportunities to work with students throughout their educational careers instead of just in a capstone course. To fully take advantage of these opportunities, librarians need to translate their own knowledge of information literacy into the language of engineering educators, and indeed inform the pedagogy of those educators. This paper attempts to create just such a bridge, focusing on the information resources and processes needed by engineers engaged in the design process and bringing together the literature of both the engineering education and library science communities.