Monday, December 10, 2012

Indicators of an Information Literate University

The Information Literate University (ILU) was the theme of the seminars that I have been giving in Canada with Bill Johnston. There is an article from a few years ago in which we explain the idea of the ILU and also list indicators of an ILU. We have three groups of indicators: for “embryonic” ILU, “intermediate” ILU and “Working towards an ILU”. This includes indicators concerning students, librarians, academics, management, and approaches to teaching, learning and assessment.
One of the universities we were working with (York University) had used this list of indicators in an internal exercise with librarians, and we used the indicators as the basis of the main activity with the group of universities in the second workshop (at the University of Waterloo, see photo above). They are an aid to assessing where your organisation is, identifying where people differ in perceptions of where you are, and planning where you want to be.
The article which includes the list is here: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/staffs-webber-johnston.pdf  It first appeared as: Webber, S. and Johnston, B. (2006) “Working towards the information literate university.” In Walton, G. and Pope, A. (Eds) Information literacy: recognising the need. Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent: 17 May 2006. Oxford: Chandos. pp 47-58.

No comments: