Mission Statements: Useful or useless?

Mission statements are odd creatures. They can be very useful, guiding an organization and keeping them focused. Or they can be written, slapped on a website or a wall somewhere and forgotten. In the case of my old pal, Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices (which I will be calling Best Practices from here on out to avoid spilling any more unnecessary screen ink), a mission statement is the first step in having this best practices program. I agree, as long as it doesn't become just another thing that is overlooked on the library's website.
The Best Practices document says the mission statement should include lots of different things including:

• A definition of IL
• Benefits to all constituencies
• Relevant lifelong learning options for all
• Statements related to the mission of the university and other institutional documents

Whew! Instead of diving into all that right away, I did what any good reference librarian would do and Googled for other schools' IL mission statements. I'll share these today and next time start addressing these bullet points for our university.

Palo Alto College- seems to have all the elements, but I hope ours is shorter
Carnegie Mellon University- I like this one a lot. It's concise, with all the relevant information.
Pierce College- Home to information literacy superstar Deb Gilchrist, this one is simple but effective and appropriate to the institution.
University of Southern Maine- This one brings in lifelong learning and USM goals and related documents. They don't call it a mission statement, but this is the one I'd most closely like to emulate.

Of course, there are lots of others, but this is a sampling to start with. Next time, I'll compile some UNCG-specific statements and start figuring out how to create a draft of this thing. Should be fun!

What is information literacy anyway?

According to the ACRL Characteristics, a mission statement has to include a variety of things. The first thing listed is a definition of information literacy. Sounds easy enough, right? We deal with this every day, therefore the definition should be pretty easy to come up with. Unfortunately, there are several definitions floating around out there, all of which appear to be saying pretty much the same thing in different words. For example:
"Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information." ACRL
"Information literacy is knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner." CILIP

CILIP has actually compiled many definitions in one convenient place. I know they're very similar, but I personally like the CILIP one better because it sounds a bit more personal and seems more understandable to a non-librarian. Hopefully my office won't be stormed by the ACRL police for saying that.
Anyway, choosing a definition should be pretty easy. I'm going to send both of these off to my colleagues and let them vote. I'll post later what they decide.

Introduction and purpose

Hi! I'm Amy. I'm a librarian in North Carolina at a medium-sized academic library. From 2006-2009, I was the First-Year Instruction Librarian. As of January 4, I'm the Information Literacy Program Coordinator. What does this mean? I don't really know yet. My previous position was very well-defined: plan, coordinate and teach 100-level classes at the university. This new one, not so much. I'm really excited to see how it all unfolds.
We've always thought of our program as a library instruction program. Thank goodness they'd already dispatched with "BI" before I got here. But now, a combination of forces has lead us to take the next step, which means going worldwide! Or, campuswide, at least. At the same time, I'll be doing a self-study of our program as it exists now and trying to make sure we have what we need. For this undertaking, I'm using the Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices. I'll be blogging about this process as well as other random musings about library instruction and information literacy and where they meet (and don't).