This book, Information Literacy in the wild, is an outcome of a module at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, USA: Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning which is taken by Masters students in librarianship and in Education. The students have to observe a mentor's teaching practice on placement, do some of their own teaching and develop a teaching intervention or tool in a placement for the class. There are 27 short chapters in which students reflect on their teaching experiences. The chapters are grouped by the educational context: school classroom, school library, college, university, public libraries and a couple of other other contexts.
On 19 March 2012, Birmingham City University Library and Learning Resources has a conference on its City South Campus, Birmingham, UK: The Missing Link: making the connection between information literacy and an excellent student experience.
Library Trends, volume 60 issue 2, Fall 2011, focuses on "Towards policy formulation" on information literacy, a special issue edited by John Crawford. This looks a very interesting issue! This is a priced journal.
Booking is open for the LILAC 2012 (information literacy) conference to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, 11-13 April 2012. There is now a Linked In group, a Facebook group and a Twitter feed (they are all linked from the LILAC home page, at the bottom).
The new issue of Education Libraries, the open-access journal published by the Education Division of the (US) Special Libraries Association, focuses on workplace information literacy. This is Volume 34, Number 2; Winter 2011. Key articles are:
1. Havelka, S. and Verbovetskaya, A. (2012) "Mobile information literacy: Let’s use an app for that!" College and research libraries news, 73 (1), 22-23. http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/1/22.full. A short article. Their mobile resources page, as an example, is at http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/library/database-mobile.php Thanks to Mark Jones, who highlighted this article.
When it launched the revised Seven Pillars model of Information Literacy (shown right), the (UK) Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) said they aimed to develop further "lenses" on the pillars. They have just updated the draft of The SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy through a Digital Literacy lens and there is also the draft of an Open Content lens. The 7 Pillars page, with the links, is at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html
Many of you will have heard about the one day "strike" being held today by some websites, to protest against the proposed legislation SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (The Protect IP Act). You can find out more about this on the SOPA Strike website. The most publicised action has been the blackout of the English-language Wikipedia site (although not its mobile version).
Huvila, I. (2011) “The complete information literacy? Unforgetting creation and organization of information.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 43 (4), 237-245. "Even though the concept of information literacy typically embraces an idea of a complete participation in an information community, its definitions have tended to underline the phases of seeking, searching and evaluation instead of creating information. Shortcomings of information creation can, however, explain many of the difficulties of finding information. This article develops the notion of information literacy with a specific focus on integrating creation and organization of information as central aspects of being information literate and discusses the implications of developing information creation processes from the point of view of information professionals and users. Finally, suggestions are made for how information creation might be improved in practice."
Vol 35, No 111 (2011) of Library and Information Research has been published. It is an open-access online journal. Articles include:
Ohio State University Libraries recently announced their Infolit Toolkit "The goal of the toolkit is to provide a framework for sharing resources, insights and discussions that can enhance the teaching of information literacy on our campus and to support faculty efforts towards that end. The toolkit consists of tools, blog posts, interactive commenting features, and linking features that allow participants to find and share aids for teaching IL and to deepen their own understanding of IL." The tools, blog posts and links can be browsed and are also grouped under the headings "Advising Students", "Teaching", "Research" and "New Faculty". http://library.osu.edu/toolkit/
February 4 2012 is the United Kingdom's National Libraries Day "a national celebration of libraries, librarians and library staff." There is a website at http://www.nationallibrariesday.org.uk The hashtag is #nld12 and the event is on Facebook and Twitter (@NatLibrariesDay) and has a Flickr pool at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1801651@N25/ The logo shown here,by richhawk57, is available from the Flickr pool under a Creative Commons License.
Last week saw the announcement of the new Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education by the (US) Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). They define Visual Literacy (VL) as "a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media". The VL Standards include: an introduction & definition; brief discussions of VL as it relates to higher education and to information literacy; "suggestions for implementing the Standards"; a bibliography, and, obviously, the standards themselves. The document is at http://www.ala.org/acrl/files/standards/visualliteracy.pdf and the ACRL VL blog is at http://acrlvislitstandards.wordpress.com/
Thanks to Sharmana (Alison Sharman) who highlighted this video from the University of Sydney from a few years ago, which provides an amusing take on search terms and Boolean logic. Sharman identifies that it is more successful with UK students than with students who do not have English as a first language and there are also some interesting comments on the Youtube site (e.g. "this lesson was boring and a waste of period 5 friday") but still it is worth a look. The video is on Youtube at http://youtu.be/Oa66AxTbjxA
On Dean Giustini's blog (he is a medical librarian in Canada) I found a link to a recent paper of his, which can be read in full on his Slideshare page. It is about a workshop helping healthcare managers understand how social media could help them keep up to date (and obviously, keeping up to date is part of information literacy):
Dr. Michael Eisenberg (University of Washington Information School) and Adria Vasil have been announced as keynote speakers at the Canadian Information Literacy conference, WILU (May 23-25 2012; Edmonton, Canada). Vasil is "a Canadian journalist who advocates for environmental issues, women’s and human rights, and the author of Ecoholic, a book that helps consumers make environmental product choices." The conference website is at http://sites.macewan.ca/wilu2012/
I think I failed to blog about the Library Impact Data Project (based at the UnNiversity of Huddersfield), for which Phase 1 was carried out last year and Phase 2 is continuing this year. The aim of Phase 1 was "to prove a statistically significant correlation between library usage and student attainment." This they did by taking data from 8 universities and showing a correlation between class of degree and both borrowing books and using electronic resources. As they emphasise, this is a correlation, and you cannot prove causality, but nevertheless it is a very useful piece of research. They also did some focus groups, and Phase 2 is exploring further; it "will further exploit the data, investigate possible causal aspects and disseminate findings from both phases". The project blog is at http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/, with papers at http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/articles-and-conference-papers/ and a data collection toolkit at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/11571/
The preliminary programme for the LILAC (UK information literacy) conference (being held in Glasgow, Scotland, 11-13 April 2012) is available: http://lilacconference.com/WP/programme/parallel-sessions/
