Information literacy education during the pandemic: The cases of academic libraries in Chinese top universities

Abstract The outbreak of COVID-19 poses new challenges to information literacy education. Facing the worldwide pandemic, academic libraries in various countries are still exploring how to cope with the situation. Little research has been carried out on how academic libraries should systematically promote information literacy education during the pandemic. This study uses 42 academic libraries at the top universities in China as cases for content analysis, focusing on information literacy education via online mini-courses, lectures, and other online teaching methods. The study has found that information literacy education during the pandemic has several characteristics, such as rapid response to information needs, recommending reliable information resources to users, developing and gathering current information on COVID-19 cases, and resisting misinformation and false information. Although libraries act quickly to meet users' needs in this new situation, they are still confronted with some problems, such as insufficient planning, untimely updates, incomplete resources, etc. This study suggests that libraries adopt the following approaches to the development of information literacy education under the new norm of the pandemic: boosting online courses with multi-platform linkage; developing innovative teaching models with online and offline combination; exploring teaching opportunities and expanding teaching content according to new information needs; fighting misinformation.