Carol Kuhlthau Is the OG IL Punk Librarian

And then we tried to use it in a fifty-minute one-shot session.

I will admit something here. I did not know how to assess with the Framework. I tried to map the Standards onto it, to build a bridge between the world the Framework imagined and the world my library dean needed documented. I attended the conversations. I read the think pieces. And eventually, I threw up my hands and said whatever. I kept doing what I could do in the time I had, because I was a research and instruction librarian, not an IL coordinator. I was not being paid enough to carry the Framework’s unfinished business on top of everything else I’m supposed to do. I suspect I wasn’t alone.

The negotiations that happened in that gap, between the Framework’s theoretical ambitions and the institution’s need for measurable outcomes, were mostly invisible and very much exhausting. Assessment ate it. Mind you, I don’t think assessment is evil. The Framework handed practitioners a vision without handing them the conditions to realize it. Threshold concepts require time, iteration, relationship. The one-shot session has fifty minutes and a learning objective that fits in a box.

Assessment ate it.

Where are we now? Somewhere in between. ACRL has acknowledged the gap. Supporting documents exist, bridge-building is happening, the conversations continue. Those who championed the Framework insisted it was fully assessable. Maybe it is. I never saw anything concrete that helped me answer that question in a room with thirty undergraduates and fifty minutes on the clock. The IL coordinators I was supposed to follow did not give me explicit instructions either. So I did what professors expected, what students expected, what the institution had always expected: I taught the database. I made it useful. I made it relational when I could. And I waited.

Now I am hearing that AI literacy is being discussed for integration (or something?) into the Framework. I have questions. I am waiting to see what happens. I have been here before.

As I said earlier, I am a research and instruction librarian. I have been one for nine years at the same institution. I have been one at different institutions for eight. I teach database demos. I am also always quietly running a parallel curriculum whenever I can.

I call it relational librarianship. It is not a departure from the session plan. It lives inside it, in the moves I make before I ever open a database. The first thing I usually tell students is they are already researchers. Not that they will become researchers once they learn the correct search syntax. They are already. Now. The research identity comes first, before the tool, before the tutorial, before the learning objective typed into the box on the instruction request form. Then I ask them what they feel when they are given an assignment, when it lands. What goes through your mind? Usually I get crickets. So I pivot: when you hear the word “research,” what comes up? What feelings? Anxiety comes fast. Overwhelm. I have to prompt for curiosity, for anything generative. The room tells me something true in those first two minutes that no needs assessment form ever could.

Then I ask what they do first when an assignment is given. “I go to the library,” someone says, and internally I note that this is not what our statistics suggest. Not really. Externally I say something encouraging and then ask: What else? There is always a hesitation. Occasionally someone brave says “I Google it.” And I say: Me too! Especially when the topic is unfamiliar. Especially when I need to get a feel for the language before I go anywhere near a database. The relief in the room is almost audible.

This is not a departure from information literacy instruction. This is information literacy instruction. It’s just instruction that begins with the researcher rather than the resource. It begins with affect, with identity, with the information environment the student already inhabits: Google, yes, and also their syllabus, their professor’s off-hand comment, the Wikipedia rabbit hole at midnight. The library is part of that environment. It is not the whole of it, and pretending otherwise has never served anyone. Carol Kuhlthau knew this in 1991. She said so. The field nodded and went back to the checklist.

I am still here, teaching the database demo, slipping the rest in around the edges. This is what punk looks like with a faculty ID and a tenure file.

This semester I built a tool. It’s not a rubric. Not a learning outcomes matrix. It’s a map, specifically, a tide chart, of what the research process actually feels like from the inside. I call it the Research Dive, and I ground it on Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process, because she already did the empirical work and the field just didn’t listen hard enough.

The Research Dive has eight stages. It begins where research actually begins. Not at the database, not at the library, but at the moment an assignment is given and a student stands at the shore wondering what they are even looking at. It names the affects: mild curiosity, mild confusion, the specific excitement-and-nervousness of realizing you are about to go into deeper water than you have been before. It names the moves: trawling Google for language before you evaluate anything, sorting the catch for signal rather than just credibility, reading the seascape rather than just hunting for the pearl.

It also names the community. The professor, the librarian, the peers. Not as authorities over the catch, but as the diving group. More experienced divers with more logged time in changing conditions. That is not hierarchy. That is collegiality. That is what Kuhlthau was pointing at when she insisted that the affective dimension of research is not incidental noise but the actual terrain.

The tool will live as a handout at a conference poster session in June 2026. It will become a worksheet for undergraduates in the fall. It will probably get smuggled into a graduate session as something to take home, because the professor wants a database demo and I will give them one, and I will also give them this. That is the parallel curriculum. That is the punk move. The tool is not a departure from my job. It is my job, finally made visible.

I am not arguing that database demos are worthless. I am arguing that they are insufficient. I am arguing that a fifty-minute session that begins with the database rather than the researcher is a session that has already made a choice — about who knowledge is for, about what a student is, about what a librarian does. I made that choice differently. I make it every time.

If you are a practitioner reading this — research and instruction librarian, subject librarian, IL coordinator, whoever you are — I suspect you already know what I am talking about. You have felt the room shift when you said something true. You have watched a student’s back soften when you said, I Google it too. You have slipped something real in around the edges of the session plan and felt the particular satisfaction of the parallel curriculum running clean underneath the official one. I know I’m not the only one who does this.

This is relational librarianship. It doesn’t require a new framework. It doesn’t require supporting documents or an ACRL task force or a revised rubric. It requires paying attention to the person in front of you before you pay attention to the database. It requires believing that affect is data, that confusion is information, that the researcher’s inner life is not noise to be managed but terrain to be mapped.

Carol Kuhlthau knew this. She handed us the map in 1991. We are still catching up.

I teach the database demo. I also tell students they are already researchers. I normalize Google. This fall, I will hand out a tide chart of the research process grounded in a 1991 paper the field admired and then quietly shelved. I liken peer review to a conversation because that is what it is, and because students understand conversations in a way they do not yet understand apparatus and gatekeeping. I slip the real curriculum in around the edges of the official one and I feel no guilt about it.

Carol Kuhlthau handed the field a map of the inner life of the researcher and the field went back to the checklist. I am still using her map. I made my own to help students continue to be the navigators they are already. I am still in the room. I am tenured, I am paying attention, and I am educating.

This is what librarian punk looks like, academic style.
Deal with it.