Information needs in the financial sector

The latest issue of Information research has just come out. One article which caught my eye was:
Miranda, S.V. and Tarapanoff, K.M.A. (2008). "Information needs and information competencies: a case study of the off-site supervision of financial institutions in Brazil." Information research, 13 (2) http://InformationR.net/ir/13-2/paper344.html

Although they weren't dealing explicitly with information literacy, it seems to me that the "competencies" are essentially information literacy. Much of the information that their research subjects needed was packaged and chanelled to them using information systems. However they still needed skills in:
- making sense of the mass of information;
- analysing it to make decisions;
- recognising new information needs;
- using information management tools to handle the information.
My own interpretation of this is that the research subjects were using, in terms of the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of information literacy, Pillar 1 (Recognising the information need) and later pillars (e.g. Pillar 7: Synthesise and create). It reinforces the idea that, to prepare learners for workplace information handling, it is important not just to focus on the search/retrieve parts of information literacy education
Photo by Sheila Webber: sand crab patterns, Yeppoon, June 2008

Approaches to web searching, and teaching it

Today there is an "Information Literacy Symposium" at the Lifelong Learning Conference.
Currently Sylvia Edwards and Lynn McAllister are talking about the modules they have developed building on Sylvia's research into undergraduate experiences of web searching. The presentation began by giving a summary of this. The experiences were
- Information searching seen as looking for a needle in a haystack.
- Information searching seen as finding a way through a maze.
- Information searching is seen as using the tools as a filter.
- Information searching is seen as panning for gold.

She has described this research in a website: http://www.netlenses.fit.qut.edu.au/ If you click the link to the Flash animation you will go to a site that includes animations that portray each category - if your computer does Flash, do explore this area (the link is in the middle of the paragraph of the site's home page).
Sylvia went on to describe variation theory - which regular blog readers will remember is an approach I am taking with our new Education for Information Literacy module. You are helping students understand by designing learning which brings out the differences in different approaches to (in this case) web searching (in my case, teaching information literacy).

Lynn took over to describe the online modules (ROSS:Reflective Online Searching Skills) that are based on Sylvia's work, developing students in all of the "lenses" on web searching. The module is also based around a cycle of action and reflection. ROSS "was developed as an online learning tool to help students develop their skill and knowledge in online searching." Last year it was embedded in two first year units, in Science Faculty and in the IT faculty. The latter is a 3rd year module, with coursework assessment. They work on an information consultant's report as one of their assessments, and they work through ROSS whilst they are doing this. Ross starts with a video of a client interview (helping students identify client information needs).

Adapting ROSS to the Environmental Science programme involved quite a lot of change, bearing in mind the lecturer's preferences, the students' learning styles etc. There is less text and are fewer activities. It includes a communication area, as the student expressed a need for this. This ROSS was based on the "dead fsh" problem, and there was then a version for Engineering, similar to Environmental Science, but with a problem about bridge construction.

Student feedback indicated students liked being led through, they thought there ws still too much text. They also wanted the work to be assessed (i.e. wanting direct reward for doing it rather than seeing how it will help them in getting better marks elsewhere). If you want more information, there is a Publications section on Sylvia's website, as noted above, and there is a paper here.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Dawn, Yeppoon, Australia, June 2008.

Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

I'v been doing a lot of information literacy things over the last days and haven't had time to blog! I'll do some posts about that tomorrow, in the meantime, a recent book on information behaviour.
Spink, A and Zimmer, M. (Eds) (2008) Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin ; London : Springer. ISBN: 9783540758280 3540758283
This has chapters from people doing research in different parts of the information science discipline (that is what seems to be be meant by multidisciplinary, rather than looking at searching from the perspective of people in different disciplines)
More information at http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+&
+information+retrieval/book/978-3-540-75828-0

Infokits

Infokits from JISC are are online resources with brief sections identifing key issues,
with links and reading lists. For example the one on personal information management, "Based around the four-phase information lifecycle as a consistent model underpinning the management of all types of internal information, this set of linked resources includes specific strands on records management and email management, providing more detailed guidance in these areas." There are useful guides in other areas like Social software, change management. http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits

Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield, Feb 2008.

New info behaviour/ society articles

James, J. (2008) "Digital preparedness versus the digital divide: A confusion of means and ends" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59 (5), 785-791.

Choo, C.W. et al (2008) "Information culture and information use: An exploratory study of three organizations." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59 (5), 792-804.

Tertiary/secondary article

As a follow up to the Scottish information literacy item, a recent article:

Crawford, J. (2007) "Information literacy: the link between secondary and tertiary education project and its wider implications." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 39 (1), 17-26.

On a related theme from a later issue:

Williams, D.A. and Wavell, C. (2007) "Secondary school teachers' conceptions of student information literacy." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 39 (4), 199-212.

And while I'm mentioning that issue I might as well also cite ;-))

Webber, S. and Zhu, W. (2007) "Employment information needs of Chinese young adults in Sheffield." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 39 (4), 223-233.

Photo by Sheila Webber: light snow yesterday, Sheffield, Feb 2008.

Search history

A nice tip from Greg Sheaf on the lis-infoliteracy discussion list for saving search histories (useful if you want students to present evidence of their searches, and/or analyse what they have done) Apparently if you use the Firefox browser the history is saved in a file called history.dat, which is stored in a "profiles" folder. Greg provides useful links: http://support.mozilla.com/kb/
Profiles#Profile_folder_locations and http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/
mozilla_history_view.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: my orchid has bloomed again!

Wikipedia, Virtual worlds etc.

On December 17th there was a discussion led by Ishbel Hartmann (Vicki Cormie in real life), reporting on some key sessions from the RL international conference, Online 2008, held in London, UK, in December. The discussion took place on Infolit iSchool, in Second Life (the virtual world) and it was part of the Centre for Information Literacy Research discussion series. There is a full transcript of the session at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=216. I'm Sheila Yoshikawa in thsi chat, by the way.

Ishbel provided brief information on sessions by Jimmy Wales, Ian Rowland and Roo Reynolds and the discussion followed on from this. Some of Ishbel's background notes were "Jimmy Wales gave an interesting and entertaining talk on the development and future plans of Wikipedia. He talked about a video which will be released next year looking at how Wikipedia is being used in developing countries, in particular slum schools in India and in creating information resources in African countries (see http://underdogpictures.com/wikidoc/site/trailer.htm [unfortunately this starts by basically making fun of librarians]) He then went on to discuss Wikia (http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia), his new project which takes the Wiki forward from being just an encyclopaedia – or “building the rest of the library”.

Ian Rowlands, Senior Lecturer School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London, UK, talked about How the Google generation’ searches for information and the implication for research collections. "This was a fascinating and challenging discussion that there was no such thing as the an age based “Google generation” and that the demographics are far more complicated that we believe." Roo Reynolds (Metaverse evangelist with IBM) talked on Enterprise 3D; living and working in virtual words. The complete audio track and slides are available online http://rooreynolds.com/2007/12/07/
my-talk-at-online-information-07/

Information behaviour of future researchers

A research review has been published, which had the aims of establishing:
"whether or not, as a result of the digital transition and the vast range of information resources being digitally created, young people, the `Google"generation’, are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers?
"whether or not new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work?
"to inform and stimulate discussion about the future of libraries in the internet era."
It was co-funded by JISC and the British Library. The JISC press release is here and it has been picked up by the press e.g. here. The latter story is probably also prompted by the fact that the Chief Executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, has just been made Dame Lynne Brindley (I worked for her for a while when I was at the BL....) This is the review:
University College London (UCL) CIBER group.(2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. London: University College London. CIBER Briefing paper; 9. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/
programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: London, December 2007.

Studying students

I don't think I blogged the free downloadable publication, a book which describes a project to address the research question "What do students really do when they write their research papers?" The researchers at the University of Rochester, USA, used some ethnographic techniques to illuminate this question, including asking students to take photographs and keep diaries. Indeed, the first editor is described as "Lead Anthropolgist" at the libraries. It is interesting both in terms of the research approach usd and the findings.

Foster, N.F. and Gibbons, S. (eds) (2007) Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/
downloadables/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf

There is also a 16 minute podcast about the study at http://blogs.ala.org/acrlpodcast.php

Photo by Sheila Webber: Barge on the Thames, London, December 2007.

Some recent articles

Pages Pinto, M. and Vinciane Doucet, A. "An Academic Portal for Higher Education Information Literacy: The e-COMS Initiativ." The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33 (5), 604-611 "The e-COMS portal is generic and transversal, and is valid for all university students who need to acquire skills and training in information literacy, particularly in relation to the management of e-learning content. This initiative is a pioneer project in the field of library science and documentation in Spain, and is aligned with the commitment of the Spanish University Library Network (Red Espan˜ola de Bibliotecas Universitarias) to promote the creation and integration of useful teaching materials, to promote information literacy in students and to participate in autonomous learning. This is the philosophy behind the design of the e-COMS academic portal, freely available at http://www.mariapinto.es/e-coms ." I have not explored this portal, since my Spanish language skills are poor, but it is indeed accessiblee at that address for Spanish speakers.

Maybe, C. (2007) "Understanding our student learners: A phenomenographic study revealing the ways that undergraduate women at Mills College understand using information." Reference Services Review, 35 (3), 452 - 462. "This research project aims to provide an understanding of Mills College undergraduate students' experience of using information, which Mills librarians can use to develop effective information literacy instructional pedagogy. Using a phenomenographic methodology, 18 undergraduate students at Mills College in Oakland, California, were interviewed and the transcripts were analyzed to reveal the ways that undergraduates experience using information.... Four distinct ways that Mills undergraduates experience information use are revealed in the paper." (An interesting study, though I note that it only seems to have one phenomenographic dimension of variation, which seems suprising ;-)

Mokhtar, I.A., Majid, S. and Foo, S. (2007) "Information literacy education through mediated learning and multiple intelligences: A quasi-experimental control-group study." Reference Services Review, 35 (3), 463-486. "This paper aims to present the findings of a study that investigated the impact of information literacy (IL) teaching approaches, which are grounded in pedagogy, on students' level and applicability of IL competencies. A quasi-experimental control group study was carried out with 476 students, aged from 13 to 15 years old, from four secondary (high) schools in Singapore ... The results of the group reports and project evaluation done by three independent and neutral teacher-examiners, as well as those from the pre- and post-intervention tests, found that the application of either mediated learning (or close coaching) or multiple intelligences helped students perform better in the learning and application of IL skills."

Photo by Sheila Webber: Bookshops beside the Retiro, Madrid, October 2007.

Students use of web in Aboriginal studies

The latest issue of Webology has an emphasis on folksonomies and something on Web 2.0. There is also an article:
Aitken, W. (2007). "Use of Web in Tertiary Research and Education." Webology, 4 (2). http://www.webology.ir/2007/v4n2/a42.html
This is interesting in actually putting the case for use of the web by students. It describes the example of undergraduates in Aboriginal Studies (in Australia), who were originally discouraged from using the web, but this author explains the advantages. One of the things she raises is how discovering and reflecting on what search terms do, and don't, work can be valuable (e.g. that government agencies talk about air quality rather than air pollution). She also talks about how the usage of words such as "aboriginal" and "indigenous" in websites is interesting to study in itself, with social/political implications.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Passageway, Witham Road, Sheffield, Aug 2007.

Google article

In the latest First monday, an article reporting on a research study carried out at Saint Mary’s College of California into student use of information resources:
Head, A. (2007) "Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?First Monday, 12 (8). http://firstmonday.org/
issues/issue12_8/head/index.html
"Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research."

Photo by Sheila Webber: Sloes, Hailsham, Sussex, August 2007.

Blogher 07 conference: Journalism in SL

I attended two sessions (and a disco!) of the BlogHer 07 Second Life (SL) conference. This is a conference that focuses on women (the "her") and blogging, and the Real Life (RL) version was taking place in Chicago, USA. The first session was about journalism in SL and since I think there is relevance to information behaviour and information literacy I'll blog about it here. (I have blogged about the business and SL session (and the disco) on my SL blog: I was obviously attending as Sheila Yoshikawa (my avatar).

This was a panel session, including people from the UK, USA and Australia (or, rather, their avatars). One was a woman who was a freelance journalist in RL and SL (Cybergrrl Oh), one was the editor (57 Miles, in RL Nick Wilson) of Metaversed http://www.metaversed.com/ which reports on technology and business in SL, one was Starr Sonic a presenter on SLNTV (SLNTV recorded the whole session, so you can listen & look at http://slcn.tv/blogher-sl-covering-virtual-world).

A few themes emerged.
a) SL Media are underdeveloped at the moment. If you have been in SL you will know you can search for things like shops and destinations as well as people, but there isn't to my knowledge a SL equivalent of yellow pages nor are there well-indexed business directories. Therefore (this is my view) resources like blogs are helping people to find out "what" and "where" information, as well as being essential to keep track of things like SL events and news.
b) There are a lot of different potential sources for news about SL (mostly things like blogs, but SL is increasingly being covered by traditional media), and it is difficult to keep track of what's going on. Wilson said that "you have to build a network of friends" to keep in touch with what is going on - so an emphasis on using people as information sources, and developing your own information community.
c) There was disagreement as to whether current news about SL would be interesting in the future. I think this might correspond to similar arguments about any current news - some seeing the value to social historians, others just seeing today's news as "tomorrow's fish wrapper" (Wilson).
d) SL media are developing reputation, as they would in RL, except (as ever nowadays) reputations are being developed more quickly than in the past. Nevertheless it is still a matter of people learning which sources can be trusted, which ones suit your specialist interests etc.
e) Whilst I don't think Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) owns any major SL media (yet) there is still an "Editorial bias" issue, namely where media are seen to be influenced by the creators of SL, Linden Labs. Are some sources reluctant to publish criticism of Linden? I suppose, in fact, this is more like Government Censorship (since Linden ultimately own the SL world) than media ownership.
f) As in RL, if you want to get a story into the media, you need to provide an angle, some human interest, an "exclusive" etc.
g) There is a need to get information inworld (in SL itself) and also to get information about what is going on in SL to people outside (these may be people with avatars who like to keep in touch, or people who are interested but don't go inworld). The information content may be the same, but the form that channels take in SL itself is certainly at an early stage.

I continue to think that there is a big role, potentially for information professionals and information managers within SL - associated with "libraries" in some cases, but perhaps often not tied to libraries. I must say that I didn't contribute any questions or comments - this was my first biggish conference in SL so I was in learning mode.

There are a lot of blog posts about Blogher, as you might expect, as well as the recordings of the SL sessions on SLCN. Another good write-up of a session on blogs as media and this journalism one are on Jerry Everard’s Blog at http://lostbiro.com/blog/?p=893

Map of information literacy research

Yesterday I was in Hatfield for a day of the Umbrella conference, mainly to stand by the poster, a Map of Information Literacy Research that I devised, drawing in particular on work by students on the Information Literacy Research module. I hope it will stimulate more conversation on what we need to know more about, and what are priorities for research.
I have put the poster (as a pdf of a ppt...) on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/
map-of-information-literacy-research/
The description is "It is a mindmap of information literacy research: areas of information literacy & information behaviour that are/could be researched, plus branches addressing the issue of who is researching and why they are researching. It includes some findings from delphi studies undertaken in 2006 and 2007, investigating what UK library/information people think are top priorities for information literacy research. The poster is authored by Sheila Webber, Sheila Corrall and the Information Literacy Research classess 2005/6 and 2006/7 (Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield)"

There was an information literacy track at the conference, although in the end I spent most of my time with the posters, except for going to Alex Byrne's keynote. Several colleagues presented at Umbrella too - Sheila Corrall on "IT governance", Paul Clough and Simon Tucker on "Trends in multimedia retrieval" and Philippa Levy on Theories of Change for evaluating educational projects. Paul and Andrew Cox also did a "Web 2.0" poster. I might pick up on some of these things in a future entry.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Kings Cross, on my way to Hatfield.

Research review - searching

For those of you interested in searching behaviour, two reviews in the latest edition of JASIST:

Markey, K. (2007) "Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 1: Research findings." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58 (8), 1071 - 1081. "This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews 25 years of published research findings on end-user searching in online information retrieval (IR) systems."

Markey, K. (2007) "Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 2: Future research directions." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58 (8), 1123-1130.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Garden rose, May 2007.

Use of e-books by people at UCL

CIBER, University College London, have published a study of UCL faculty and students: What do faculty and students really think about e-books? (authors: Ian Rowlands, David Nicholas, Hamid R. Jamali and Paul Huntington) "This article reports on a large-scale survey of nearly two thousand faculty and students at one institution, University College London, and profiles their use and perceptions of ebooks." http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uczciro/findings.pdf

Photo by Sheila Webber: Copper beech leaves, Weston Park, Sheffield, May 2007.

Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services

The Research Information Network has published an interesting study of Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services. The report is free on the RIN website. "This study was designed to provide an up-to-date and forward-looking view of how researchers interact with academic libraries in the UK. Harnessing empirical data and qualitative insights from over 2250 researchers and 300 librarians...(etc.)" The study was undertaken by Key Perspectives Ltd. One of the things the researchers were asked about was what they tthought th elibrarians' top roles would be in 5 years time - "Custodian" came top ;-( "Teach info skills" was 5th out of 13.

Brown, S. and Swan, A. (2007) Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services. Research Information Network. http://www.rin.ac.uk/researchers-use-libraries

Photo by Sheila Webber: inside the new Information Commons (this is looking down on the quiet study area - it also has groupwork rooms etc.) Within a few days (it opened on 10th April) it seems to have totally filled up with students.

Departmental research seminar

Last Friday (30th March) Dr Christine Bruce (Associate Professor, Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Australia) kindly agreed to give a research seminar in the morning, and to be one of the speakers at a research event in the afternoon. That's her (right) with me (left): I forgot to take any photos during the day, so it was left until after the meal on Friday evening (thus my glazed expression).

I had invited people particularly concerned with IL research at Sheffield to the morning event (e.g. students & staff doing IL projects and dissertations, and members of the CILASS Information Literacy Network). Participants had posed questions in advance and Christine responded with her thoughts and stimulated discussion around the questions. These included questions about Web 2.0 and information literacy, developing pedagogies for information literacy, and the issue of whether you can call information literacy "information literacy" in the workplace.

The afternoon was a free event, open to anyone, and there were about 30 people there, researchers, students and librarians. Christine talked about Information literacy: models from research. She discussed the nature and agenda for information literacy research, and give an insight into the models which have emerged from research by staff and students at Queensland University of Technology (see previous post). Then Professor Nigel Ford and I talked about Information Literacy research in the Department of Information Studies, and the UK research agenda. Here is the presentation powerpoint in pdf form: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/30-3-2007-webber-ford.pdf

After a refreshment break, Bill Johnston (Senior Lecturer, Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement, University of Strathclyde, Scotland) and I talked about Conceptions of information literacy of UK Chemistry and English academics. This presentation was based on research findings from the Arts & Humanities Research Council project “UK academics’ conceptions of, and pedagogy for, information literacy”. Here is the presentation powerpoint in pdf form: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/30-3-2007-webber-johnston.pdf. Finally, Nigel Ford and Andrew Madden had a conversation around research findings from the Arts & Humanities Research Council project Understanding the dynamics of information seeking: analysing searchers' strategic changes over time, funded February 2005-July 2007.

I felt rather zonked by the end of the day, since I was the prime organiser (with assisstance from Phussadee Dokphrom, one of my PhD students). However, I intend to follow it up with some more events focusing on IL and information behaviour, as there is a lot going on in this area here.