The precursor to the Association of College & Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education was the Association's Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. This document from 2000 established five Information Literacy Competency Standards and associated Performance Indicators and Outcomes.
Standard 1 - The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
Standard 2 - The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
Standard 3 - The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
Standard 4 - The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
Standard 5 - The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.
While highly influential in the early 21st century, the Standards were eventually deemed too prescriptive while not acknowledging the more complex and social information landscape that had emerged by the mid-2010s. The Standards were eventually rescinded by ACRL in 2016.
While not a standard per se, the Association of American Colleges & Universities Information Literacy Value Rubric provides guidelines on assessing student work to gauge students' information skills. The rubric encourages looks at a collection of student work that contains things like papers, speeches, presentations, etc. The rubric evaluates the student work in the following ways:
Each area is evaluated as Capstone, Milestones, or Benchmark.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has established an international framework for measuring information literacy. Towards Information Literacy Indicators describes five elements of information literacy:
For UNESCO, information literacy is useful in different contexts such as health and well being, civic society, education, and work and economic activity.
The Society of College, National and University Libraries, which represents all university libraries in the UK and Ireland, has established the the Seven Pillars of Information Literacy skills model. This model states that information literate people "will demonstrate an awareness of how they gather, use, manage, synthesise and create information and data in an ethical manner and will have the information skills to do so effectively."
The seven pillars are:
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has established guidelines on information literacy for lifelong learning. These guidelines are intended to provide a "pragmatic framework for those professionals who need or are interested in starting an information literacy program." The standards are grouped into three basic components that each have subcomponents.