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Information Literacy Star Profile:

Lorie Roth, PhD, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs


Dr. Jan Steyaert Lorie Roth currently serves as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, in the Chancellor’s Office of the California State University. In this position, she oversees several programs that provide special opportunities for Cal State faculty and students. These include CSU Summer Arts, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, the Pre-Doctoral Program, the Office of Community Service Learning, and the California Academic Partnership Program. Before working at CSU, she was Assistant Vice President at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, as well as Associate Professor of English. She started her career at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, after receiving her Ph.D. in English from Kent State University. She has served as a technical writing consultant for, among others, Gulfstream Aerospace, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She has published articles on writing on the job, computers and writing, the publishing industry, British literature, baseball, and information literacy.

Contribution to the Promotion of Information Literacy:
Lorie Roth’s interest in information literacy began in 1993 when a librarian at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia, emptied trashcans to show her the computer printouts of undergraduate students’ library searches—a story recounted in Patricia Senn Breivik’s 1998 book Student Learning in the Information Age. From that pivotal moment in the library, she has been a passionate advocate for increasing undergraduate students’ information literacy skills. As an administrator at the California State University, a system of 23 campuses, Dr. Roth and her colleagues in 1994 began a major initiative to use partnerships between college faculty and librarians to integrate information literacy into the academic curriculum.

This effort has been distinctive in many ways: First of all, its scope has been enormous—trying to engage a critical mass among 23 different universities, 22,000 faculty members, and over 400,000 students. Because of generous fiscal support from system administrators, the CSU has been able to implement many different models of, approaches to, and strategies for information literacy. These include developing assessment tools, offering faculty development opportunities, building outreach to the K-12 sector, creating tutorials, and pilot-testing numerous ways of building information competencies into regular academic coursework from the freshman to the senior year and in disciplines as diverse as accounting and zoology. The California State University has been successful at raising awareness of this issue, promoting information literacy as an essential skill for undergraduates, and persuading faculty to adopt information literacy as an expected learning outcome for their academic programs.

Along with CSU colleagues Ilene Rockman and Gordon Smith, Dr. Roth has been working with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and several other universities to develop and implement on online scenario-based simulation that assesses student skills in using information. It is expected that this two-hour online assessment will be available in 2006.

In addition to promoting information literacy within the California State University, Dr. Roth has made presentations to a variety of universities and organizations across the United States, including the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the American Association for Higher Education.

She continues to support a variety of efforts to ensure that students graduate from the university with information literacy skills.

Selected Publications:
Review of Integrating Information Literacy into the Higher Education Curriculum: Practical Models for Transformation by Ilene F. Rockman and Associates. Exchanges: The Online Journal of Teaching and Learning (2004). http://www.exchangesjournal.org/reviews/review_1191.html

“Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, and the American Professor: What Academic Novels Tell About Teaching.” AAHE Bulletin, June 2002: 3-6. http://www.aahebulletin.com/public/archive/americanprofessor.asp

“[The Book that Influenced My Teaching].” PMLA 115 (2000): 2033-34.

“Educating the Cut-and-Paste Generation.” Library Journal, 124.18 (Nov. 1999): 42-44.

Contact Information:
Dr. Lorie Roth
Office of the Chancellor
California State University
401 Golden Shore
Long Beach, CA 90802
Telephone: 562-951-4779
Fax: 562-951-4981
lroth@calstate.edu

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Dr. Lana Jackman
Sharon Weiner
Co-Chairs, National Forum on Information Literacy