I saw a discussion of incentives

Context
I belong to an e-mail list called ili-l, which stands for Information Literacy Instruction. A recent post on the list asked for suggestions for promoting a certain type of classes. Several responses came back including, "give the students chocolate."

Commentary
Information Literacy Instruction is the practice of teaching someone to find information and use it effectively and ethically, so it's something all librarians engage in to some extent. However, because of the centrality of research to the mission of universities, it's particularly important to academic librarians, and they dominate the discussion on ili-l.

It's particularly depressing to me, therefore, that academic librarians often feel like their role in the information universe is belittled. Apparently people in their communities (not just students, but faculty and administration as well) really believe that everything is on the Internet. This is wrongheaded enough, but even if all the useful information in the world was on the internet, you would still need information professionals (librarians are one class of those, but there are others) to help you find it and use it.

So some academic librarians are reduced to asking how they can possibly convince students at their institutions to avail themselves of their service, and others are reduced to suggesting that students be bribed with chocolate. I had a hard time getting started on this blog entry because I didn't know how to express the many, many reasons I think this is wrong. I finally decided to stick with just one: handing out candy doesn't convince people of the importance of your enterprise; it trivializes it.

Picture this: Lakeisha Student comes back from her Information Literacy class and her roommate asks what it was like. "Well," she says, "I learned to use controlled vocabulary to create more effective searches in specialized databases and I got some M&Ms_(tm)!" It's like somebody saying, "I climbed Mount Everest yesterday, and when I got to the top there was a McDonald's_(tm)!" By the way, if you don't know what I mean by "using controlled vocabulary to create more effective searches in specialized databases," you might want to ask a librarian. You'd be amazed at what you can learn.

What did you see today?