Performing Arts and the ACRL Framework: Using the Music Companion

While the ACRL Framework (2016) provides broad threshold concepts for information literate students, interpreting these concepts for performing arts classrooms and practices can be especially challenging. Librarians working with theater, musical theatre, dance, and performance studies may encounter students and faculty who perceive a disconnect between their work and traditional “scholarship” or “research” invoked by the language of the Framework. Compared to conventional information literacy instruction, interactions with arts courses involve disciplinary ideas of authority, methods of inquiry, creative approaches, and processes for finding and exploring information that may be unrecognizable for many librarians and academics outside arts fields. However, the Framework’s threshold concepts can be interpreted in ways that readily accommodate the variety of sources, processes, and techniques used in the performing arts. The recently published Music Companion to the Framework for Information Literacy (2023) is the first companion document intended for a performing arts field. This brief essay provides a concise introduction to the Music Companion as a way to support the work of performing arts librarians, bridge disciplines for those with multiple liaison roles, and possibly inspire the creation of other arts companions to the Framework. Using the Music Companion as a model, each Frame is addressed through an explanation of performing arts considerations and discipline-specific examples of learning outcomes and applications. Performing arts librarians may also share many of the concerns the Music Companion was meant to address, including intersections of scholarly and artistic authority, searching and evaluation of non-text sources, complex issues of copyright and citation in performed works, and artistic research through embodied exploration.