Analysis of historical trend of user education: Are librarians educators as well?

Aim. The main purpose of this research is to study the historical trend of user education in libraries and the competencies required for teacher-librarians to teach. It also aims to survey the viewpoints of academic librarians at Shahid Chamran and Jundi Shapur University of Medical Sciences in Ahvaz.
Method. For the first part of the study, the literature was reviewed; For the second part of the paper, an author-designed questionnaire was used. The validity of the questionnaire was approved by 4 teaching staffs in the fields of LIS and psychology. The reliability of the questionnaire was determined by Cronbach's Alpha which was 0.91 for men, 0.79 for women, and 0.90 for the whole scale. Of 80 questionnaires distributed, 56 questionnaires were used in analyses using SPSS 19.
Results. The results showed that librarians totally assessed their competency for teaching as "moderate"; the only item being "high" was "enjoying teaching others". Using Friedman rank test, it was revealed that respondents ranked the items "enjoying teaching others", " teaching competency", and "ability to transfer the concepts to others" as the first, the second, and the third in terms of importance, respectively. The 13th, the last, was "being familiar with designing exam questions".
Keywords: reference librarians; user education; teacher-librarians' competencies; academic libraries