Understanding the way children search is critical to information literacy education. Children take time to develop cognitive and mechanical skills, vocabulary, and memory recall. Children lack many of the necessary abilities to create an effective search in many of the catalogs that are out there. Many catalogs have been created with adults in mind and most have hardly adapted their systems in a way that could make them more accessible to young students (Intner & Weihs, 2011).
It is important that librarians, along with caregivers, work to help students understand how to find information. School librarians need to be proficient themselves, knowing enough to teach children what a search process involves, how to tell whether a source is authoritative, how to jump from one source to another, what a database is, and how to create an effective search to get the information they are seeking. All of these things, and many more, are important for children to learn and become familiar with (Intner & Weihs, 2011). By teaching information literacy, children become experts at finding information that they want or need in a proficient, confident manner.
It is a librarian's job to bring this kind of education to students through their library. The choice of catalog is one of the most important decisions a library can make. When making decisions about cataloguing, librarians need to keep the students in mind. They need to think about what will be beneficial to their users, which can also be faculty and staff. What does the school environment look like and how can the library best suit that? These are all questions school library media specialists need ot keep in mind as they manage their school libraries.
Additional Information about Information Literacy
An in-depth definition of Information Literacy by the University of New York at Plattsburgh