There is an education professional who, in the schools fortunate enough to have one, spends their career helping students and teachers to do something that the rest of the professional world is only now recognising as urgent: think well with information.
In Australia, the formal title of this professional is teacher librarian (TL). Supported by a team of school library professionals, the TL is a practitioner trained in both education and information science, working at the point where learning and information meet. Among many other things, they teach students how to find information they need, evaluate the information they encounter and use that information to build knowledge rather than merely consume content.
For those who are unaware, the work of the TL is considered peripheral. They see libraries simply as a repository of (physical) books, and the person managing the library as helpful but not central. With the digitalisation of information, many came to believe that TLs and other school library professionals were no longer needed at all, as every student (and teacher) carried access to a library of information in their pocket on their phone.
It is now manifestly apparent that this assumption was incorrect. Every school needs a team of school library professionals, led by a qualified TL to support the community in navigating a complex, volatile and dynamic information environment which influences almost every aspect of contemporary existence. Access to information via an internet browser is not the panacea that was first imagined, and as synthetic and poor quality information proliferates, the capabilities TLs foster are needed more than ever.
Skills that travel
The skills a TL develops and teaches are not library skills. They are capabilities that build information literacy. The distinction matters.
Source evaluation, for instance, is no longer limited to static websites used for research in school assignments.It is an essential life skill: the habit of asking, almost automatically, who produced this information, for what purpose, with what evidence, and if any voices have been left out. These questions must be applied every day in many different scenarios; whether for an assessment piece, a news article, a medical study, a business report, a policy document, or an AI-generated summary. Regardless of the time or place, or the age of the reader, these questions should be considered. The content and context may change; the analytical habit does not.
Being information literate is essential for learning – both formal and informal. Take for example professional learning (PL). The best (PL) is not just about attending the right workshops. It is about building networks that expose you to new ideas, developing the self-direction to pursue questions your formal training did not anticipate, and cultivating the critical distance to know which new ideas are worth your attention. These are capacities which are all present for the information literate learner.
The emergence of generative AI has sharpened what researchers have argued for some time: that the skills enabling people to engage critically with information, including media literacy, AI literacy, and complex problem solving, must be deliberately taught, not assumed. Teacher librarians, working at the intersection of information science and education, are the professionals trained to build these capacities across a whole community (Garrison and Oddone, 2025).
Tools are not enough
I have spent two decades researching and writing about how people learn in networked, information-rich environments. One consistent finding runs through that work: the organisations and institutions that do this well are not simply the ones with the best tools or the most information. They are the ones that have invested in supporting their people to engage with information critically and learn from it continuously.
Schools that have a qualified teacher librarian and give them the scope to do their work have a practitioner who is, among other things, teaching the whole school community the habits of mind that every knowledge environment now requires. The research evidence for the impact of this on student outcomes is substantial and long-standing (Hughes et al., 2025; Lance et al., 2024). What is less often recognised is that the need to foster and maintain information literacy capabilities is not unique to schools.
Any organisation that needs its people to navigate information overload, evaluate evidence, recognise misinformation, learn continuously, and engage thoughtfully with AI has the same underlying requirement. The school library is one institutional form that addresses it. Most organisations do not have an equivalent, and that absence is increasingly costly.
This is not an argument that every workplace needs a librarian, though that idea does have merit! It is an argument that the mindsets and capabilities that teacher librarians develop and scaffold are also the capacities that professional environments now urgently need, and that these skills can be taught and built into a workplace culture so that they are maintained and remain front of mind. This requires explicit attention; they are not abilities that are developed and supported through osmosis.
What This Means in Practice
The consultancy work I do draws directly on a strong research base in favour of information literacy development. Working with schools and educational organisations is the obvious application, and I continue to do that work. But the frameworks transfer.
Helping a team understand how to evaluate AI-generated information is, at its core, source evaluation. The questions are the same: who produced this, how, with what evidence, and with what interests or limitations baked in?
Helping an organisation build professional learning that actually changes practice draws on the same research that underpins the work on teacher professional networks: the conditions for effective learning are consistent across professional contexts.
Helping educators or school leaders develop a principled approach to generative AI is an information literacy question as much as a technology question. It requires the same critical, evidence-grounded framework that a teacher librarian applies to any information environment.
The through-line is not about schools, or libraries, or any particular sector. It is about the capacity to engage with information and learning deliberately, critically, and on your own terms. That capacity is what Linking Learning Advisory exists to build.
An Argument Worth Making
Information literacy is not a niche concern. These capabilities are among the most important professional competencies of this moment.
The teacher librarians I know are among the most evidence-grounded, intellectually rigorous, and practically skilled professionals I have had the privilege to work with. Although their contributions may be undervalued or misunderstood, they continue to make the case for their own relevance with research, patience, and more grace than the situation requires.
The case they are making is undeniable. When schools remove or defund their library and its staff, they frequently remove professionals who were teaching information literacy in a sustained, research-informed way. That is a loss that is evident in student outcomes, in the learning culture, and in the school’s capacity to navigate the current information environment.
But the argument is also larger than schools, and that is what I want to sit alongside the advocacy: information literacy is not a niche concern. These capabilities are among the most important professional competencies of this moment. Naming that connection is not a distraction from the advocacy for school libraries. It is, I think, the most powerful version of it.
References
Garrison, K., & Oddone, K. (2025). “It is a skill everybody needs to learn”: Australian teacher librarians steering secondary schools through shifting information landscapes. Journal of Information Literacy, 19(1), 48-68. https://doi.org/10.11645/19.1.657
Hughes, H., Allan, C., & Bozorgian, H. (2025). School library contributions to student literacy, learning, and well-being: The latest evidence, 2014–2023. In L. Marquardt & D. Oberg (Eds.), School Librarians and Principals Leading Together : International Perspectives (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798216188612.ch-014
Lance, K. C., Kachel, D. E., & Gerrity, C. (2024). Employing School Librarians: What Decision-Makers Tell Us. Phi Delta Kappan., 106(3), 42–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217241295430
