ABSTRACT
In ten years, the information literacy program at Wartburg College has been transformed from a peripheral library service to a program central to the college’s curriculum. Wartburg, a baccalaureate general college of 1,800 students, affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and located in Waverly, Iowa, is best known nationally for its music and athletics programs. The top six majors, in terms of enrollment, are business administration, communication arts, education, music, psychology, and biology. In 1994, when Jill Gremmels was hired as college librarian, the library was underutilized, unpopular with students and faculty, and disconnected from the educational enterprise. Library staff were unenthusiastic and considered information literacy a nonessential service. In addition, the library building was not conducive to information literacy activities. Gremmels was hired with an administrative mandate to “provide leadership for integration of information literacy into teaching and learning for students and faculty,”1 and Randall Schroeder was brought on board a year later. By 2005, information literacy was the stated mission of the library as well as a formal part of the college’s general education
curriculum, and business in all areas of library service had boomed (see Figure 1.1). This case study takes a thematic approach in describing the transformation.
