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The article addresses the trends and challenges that impacted library instruction at community and technical colleges in the U.S. During the 1990s, collaborations and partnerships have continued to emerge, particularly given the acceptance of information literacy outside libraries. Community college libraries are considered unique to academic libraries they can determine specific feeder high schools and work to bridge the transition between high school and college information literacy instruction. One of the vital factors that allows for information literacy to develop in community colleges is the philosophical commitment to teaching and learning.

This article explores the notion that writing theory and pedagogy can and should have a constitutive influence on the conception of information literacy. Given how much classroom practice in rhetoric and composition involves helping students with inquiry and research, it is nothing short of surprising how little that field has written about information literacy and library collaboration. Recent theoretical trends and changing pedagogical attitudes in rhetoric and composition make information literacy initiatives especially timely and opportune. From a rhetoric and composition perspective, the theoretical conceptions that ground efforts to help students access, evaluate, and use information draw from both the classical rhetorical tradition and contemporary discussions. Although the term information literacy may appear innocuous enough, seen from the perspective of work in rhetoric and composition, it conjures up a series of literacy debates that can easily undermine the effectiveness of the term. The first of these two misperceptions is that information literacy is a neutral, technological skill that is merely functional or performative. A second problem is the deficit model that the term literacy might unwittingly adopt. Thus, the concept of information literacy joins long-standing debates on literacy in ways that are both timely and propitious.