IL marketing/education for law: BIALL conference

Yesterday I gave a talk, Information literacy: marketing and educational views … and some research, at the British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) conference, held here in Sheffield. Sheffield celebrated by tipping down with rain (so I paddled to the conference dinner!) and although it had cleared up by yesterday, there were still problems with the trains (flooding) so the audience for my almost-last-in-the-conference talk was reduced. It wasn't actually as bad, though, it looks in the photo below (of previous speaker David Connolly): the plenary sessions were in Sheffield City Halls (capacity 2000, see entrance in first photo) so the 200+ delegates were inevitably somewhat spread out.

I have uploaded my presentation to Slideshare, and you can get it here. The abstract I put on Slideshare is as follows: "Sheila identifies a tension between the librarian's role as marketer and educator, and proposes relationship marketing as a context for lessening this tension. Research into chemistry and marketing academics' conceptions of information literacy is described. Sheila proposes how this might be applied to a legal environment, and says that understanding your clients’ approaches to information literacy could be fruitful for training and marketing. The presentation finishes by giving highlights into recent research by O'Brien and Rhodes into legal information professionals’ priorities for information literacy research." Slideshare provides some code to embed the presentation in your blog, but when I tried it just now it crashed the browser and lost the post, so I'm not trying that again today!

There was a question afterwards about the research technique that James O'Brien and Chistopher Rhodes used in their study (which was done as the main coursework for the IL Research module). This was the Delphi technique, and there is some more info about it on (where else) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method

Articles on academics' perceptions

Thanks to Chris Armstrong for highlighting this article from Claire McGuinness' doctoral work:
McGuinness, C. (2006) "What faculty think: exploring the barriers to Information Literacy development in undergraduate education. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32 (6), 573-582.
Abstract: "This paper reports findings from a recent Irish-based study into faculty-librarian collaboration for information literacy (IL) development. Qualitative analysis of comments made by Sociology andCivil Engineering academics shows how entrenched beliefs and perceptions may adversely affect the potential for collaboration, and prevent the inclusion of information literacy in undergraduate curricula."

In checking this I also noticed:
Gullikson, S. (2006) "Faculty perceptions of ACRL's Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education." Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32 (6), 583-592.
Abstract: "Faculty were asked how important for their students the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information Literacy Competency Standards'outcomes are, and when students should display the relevant skills. Faculty believe most of the Standards' outcomes are important but show little agreement on when students should acquire them."

Photo by Sheila Webber: Stadtpark, Vienna, Johann Strauss memorial in background, December 2006.

First year information literacy class

On Monday, in the "lecture" session of the Information Literacy class for 1st year Information Management students I had invited Alex Peng and Pam McKinney to respond to a few questions I had supplied to them earlier. Alex is a successful graduate of this course and is now studying for a PhD in the Department (an information management topic supervised by my colleague Dr Miguel Nunes). Pam has been mentioned on the blog before, as the information literacy expert in the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences. She graduated from our MSc IM course, and had a job at Sheffield Hallam University (the Other university in Sheffield) before joining CILASS. The questions I asked them were "How has being information literate helped you personally?", "Are you continuing to learn about information literacy & have your ideas about IL changed over time?" and "Have you any tips and favourite websites".

As you might imagine, I liked the way that Alex started off, by saying that "Based on my personal experience, I will strongly agree that information literacy skills are the most crucial skills that we should have in the information age." His tips at the end were about keeping track of the material you collect as you go along (rather than trying to go and find them again the day before submitting an assignment), using "different information sources for different purposes/ questions" and also organising material as you went along, so you could find it more easily.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Weston Park/ Sheffield University, Nov 2006, with a touch of Photoshop.

As we may think: email me if you'd like a copy!

Recently an article of ours was published. I am allowed to distribute pdf copies to friends, but not to just post it to the web (according to the copyright agreement) - so please email if you'd like a copy, s.webber@sheffield.ac.uk. The paper was based on the keynote Bill and I did at the WILU conference inCanada last year.

Johnston, B. and Webber, S. (2006) “As we may think: Information Literacy as a discipline for the information age” Research strategies, 20 (3), 108-121.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Weston Park, Sheffield, November 2006.

New articles

Unfortunately I still feel rather grotty, and thus have been having to concentrate on work things since I got back. Additionally, Blogger was playing up yesterday. Before I do more entries on the Slovenian conference, therefore, thanks to Ola Pilerot for highlighting a couple of recent articles.

The first one should spur me on to write, since my colleague Professor Nigel Ford and I have been discussing a potential paper about information behaviour and information literacy for ages!
Limberg, L. & Sundin, O. (2006). “Teaching information seeking: relating information literacy education to theories of information behaviour.” Information Research, 12(1) paper 280. http://InformationR.net/ir/12-1/paper280.html
The second article is: Lloyd, A. (2006). “Information literacy landscapes: an emerging picture.” Journal of Documentation, 62(5), 570-83. This aims “To describe the various landscapes in which information literacy has been explored and to propose new ways of thinking about information literacy” and in its approach “draws on constructivist-influenced grounded theory method employed during doctoral research into information literacy practices of firefighters.”

Photo by Sheila Webber: Stall in Ljubljana market, Slovenia, October 2006.