Monday, August 13, 2012

IFLA #wlic2012 IL in developing countries; Faculty attitudes to librarians

I'm blogging froom the IFLA World Library and Information Conference in Helsinki, Finland. In this post I'm going to highlight a couple more papers from a session this afternoon.
Dan Dorner (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand) talked about Improving the resources for supporting information literacy education in developing countries. A key theme was the contextual and culturally-situated nature of IL. He cited work by me and Bill Johnston (this is one of our key themes), so I immediately felt more warmly towards him ;-) He also mentioned, for example, Hofstede's framework for cultural analysis [Hofstede, G. (1983) "National Cultures in Four Dimensions: A Research-Based Theory of Cultural Differences among Nations." International Studies of Management & Organization, 13 (1/2), 46-74]. Dorner discussed this in relation to two countries: Vietnam, USA, UK and Sri Lanka and proposes a conceptual model of IL education. Questions after his talk raised the important issue of indigenous knowledge. His full paper is here: http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/wlic2012/105-dorner-en.pdf

In the same session, Christina Nilsen (Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada) presented on Faculty perceptions of librarian-led information literacy instruction in postsecondary education. As a practitioner, she understands the challenges of integrating IL and gaining access to students, and she highlighted the research and writings about faculty-librarian relationships. Nilsen carried out a questionnaire survey of faculty in Canada (106 respondents), to investigate their perceptions of academic librarians and the importance they placed on information literacy in their discipline. A large number rated their students' IL as poor or fair, also a majority rated IL as important and about half don't regularly ask librarians to teach their students. There was an interesting variety of reasons for not inviting librarians into their classes. Nilsen's full paper is here: http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/wlic2012/105-nilsen-en.pdf

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