Evan Ira Farber was Faculty Emeritus and former Head Librarian at
Earlham CollegeEarlham College is a liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana. It was founded in 1847 by Quakers and has approximately 1,200 students.The president is John David Dawson...
. Throughout his career, he has been active with the
American Library AssociationThe American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....
(ALA) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), holding positions that included Chair of the ACRL College Library Section from 1968-69 and President of the ACRL from 1978-79. He has also been active with the ACRL College Leadership Committee and the ACRL College Libraries Mentor Program.
Bibliographic Instruction
Farber was highly regarded as a leader and authority on the subject of bibliographic instruction, he began hosting conferences at Earlham College in 1977. By this time, he had developed a successful bibliographic instruction program tailored to Earlham College in its specific context. This mainly entailed integrating the instruction into specific college courses within the college’s curriculum. His five defining points of the college’s bibliographic instruction program in 1974 included flexibility and variety in the methods of instruction, the use of structured examples and illustrations in the instruction process, personalized reference services, the perception of librarians as educators, and the extension of the library’s resources to include those materials presented as much as possible. The central objectives of the program at that time were to indicate to students the differences between high school and academic libraries, to show that resources relevant to nearly any topic exist and the importance of choosing the most important and pertinent ones, to illustrate basic search strategy principles transferable to any topic, to emphasize the amount of resources that exist and the usefulness of working with a reference librarian, and to develop a readiness to search outside of the library if necessary. This approach to bibliographic instruction arose from his observations that colleges provide a particularly suitable context for both librarians and faculty to emphasize undergraduate education more than research.
Faculty-Librarian Cooperation
To support effective bibliographic instruction, he has also emphasized the necessity of developing faculty-librarian cooperation. By working together with faculty, librarians were involved in specific courses at Earlham College and were thus able to structure their instruction towards specific assignments, with the result that the instruction became directly relevant to students’ interests. Regarding the benefits of an ideal cooperative relationship between faculty and librarians, he stated: “When that cooperative relationship works well, it can result in assignments that approach, if not reach, what I consider the ideal: where both the teacher’s objectives and the librarian’s objectives are not only achieved, but are mutually reinforcing – the teacher’s objectives being those that help students attain a better understanding of the course’s subject matter, and the librarian’s objectives being those that enhance the students’ ability to find and evaluate information.”
Awards
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