Information Literacy award winner: Rebecca Mogg #LILAC25

Winner of the Information Literacy Group's Information Literacy Award 2025 (announced at the LILAC conference this week) is Rebecca Mogg, Cardiff University, Wales, for her work in diversity and impact of information literacy. "The Information Literacy Award recognises an outstanding UK-based practitioner or researcher" and there is more information here: https://www.lilacconference.com/awards/information-literacy-award
Photo by Sheila Webber: scattered cherry blossom petals, Cardiff, April 2025

Final Keynote from #LILAC25- Elinor Carmi: Data Citizenship: Learning to take action in the datafied society

A final liveblog from Pam McKinney at the LILAC Conference. This keynote from Elinor Carmi, a senior lecturer in Data Politics and social justice at City St Georges University (@elinorcarmi.bsky.social), began her keynote by reflecting on why we need to build data literacy in this turbulent world. Elinor has looked at the underlying technologies behind modern digital services and identified a need to challenge the big technology companies. It's impossible to talk about these issues without talking about AI, and it is now becoming apparent that tech companies have been selling user data to train AI. In the UL, there has been a concerted effort from content providers, e.g. newspapers, authors, and musicians, to challenge the use of their data to train AIs, and celebrities seem to have more influence to change how the government deals with this issue. Elinor reflected on the privacy paradox - people say they care about their privacy but actually don't take action to protect their data privacy. People often don't understand how cookies work, and so people can't make informed decsions about protecting their data. 

Elinor shared some findings from a research project she undertook and found that digital harms and abuses are seen as distant, complex and abstract, even though there have been some really high-profile cases of technology harming people, for example, the Post office scandal in the UK. If people experience privacy breaches, bullying, and harassment as part of their online lives, this mobilises them to explore improving their data literacy. People worry about things that are unimportant, such as the emergency alarm test in the UK, but critical risks are being ignored. We need to look at who is responsible for creating and solving the problems. Big tech companies seem to have a lot of power in the US, and platforms are reducing the protections available to users. Ultimately, the business model of online platforms is to sell you as a product and sell you advertising - they are only motivated by profit. 

People should be able to negotiate with these platforms and should be better informed. There are few avenues to challenge big technology companies, but there are a few organisations that do this, it takes huge amounts of time to take technology companies to court. Citizens can use mechanisms in platforms such as reporting and blocking to protect their rights. Elinor worked with Simeon T+yates to develop a data citizenship model, which includes data doing: practical data skills, data thinking, which includes critical skills to analyse privacy, and problem-solving, and thirdly data participation: how we can use data positively to improve our communities. People are generally unaware of just how broadly their data is being traded, so can't make informed decisions about how to protect themselves.

A data and AI citizenship model focuses on "learn" - learning about what is happening with data at the moment and being aware of issues in your own country and also in other countries. secondly, to "network", noting that libraries are important community spaces where people can meet each other and develop networks of digital literacy. Thirdly, to "act", for example, nurses have developed a patient and nurse bill of rights on how AI is used in healthcare. Archivists are trying to rescue digital information that is being removed by the Trump administration, and actors have created guidelines about how AI should be used in their industry. So where do we go from here? Yes the news is depressing, but we need to be hopeful, and create our own new reality.

Governments must have legislation to protect us, but they also need to enforce these laws. They need to encourage other types of business models that are not based on surveillance capitalism. They need to make sure that any new technology must have mandator testing and community consultation, they need to provide non-digital options for citizens. The majority of people are not aware of the Information Commissioner Office, which is the body that regulates information used in the UK.

Big tech companies must provide transparent policies that are user-friendly. The media needs to inform citizens and ask people in power hard questions. fictional shows such as black mirror can support people to recognise online harms and take action. NGOs need to raise awareness of harms and risks, e.g. the Good Law Project has challenged advertising on Meta platforms. Society needs to think about new forms of data governance and actively participate in challenging big tech. 

Photo by Pam McKinney: Standing stone in a Cardiff park

Nurturing the Next Generation of Professionals: Transformative Peer-Based Student Mentoring for Career Development #LILAC25

Pam McKinney here live blogging from the final day of the Lilac conference in Cardiff. Meredith Knoff from Indiana University Bloomington presented on a peer-based learning initiative in the library. Peer-based learning has long been used in academic libraries - peers are seen to be more approachable, and both learners and peer teachers gain a lot from the experience. The research desk in the main library focuses on collaborative learning and support across different support areas in a service hub, e.g. IT, financial wellness, etc. The research desk supports students with inquiry projects and searching for information on an individual basis at any stage of their research process. Students can make appointments or drop in, and they offer in-person and online appointments. The desk is staffed by graduate assistants titled "research assistants" to reflect the higher nature of their work on CVs when they leave the university. The majority of the research assistants are studying in the library programme but include masters and PhD students from other disciplines. 

The desk service is based on 3 learning theories: a humanist person-centred teaching perspective that emphasises choice and addresses the whole person. Secondly it is based on a dialogic learning perspective drawing on the work of Paolo Freire. This positions the librarian as just as much a learner as the students, on the same level, and the student and teacher actively participate in the learning each other. This encourages students to ask different kinds of questions. These one-on-one consultations support the students in developing their questioning techniques. The third philosophy is based on critical reflection, using metacognition to help learners connect their experiences to academic content. This theoretical basis helps students develop higher-level learning strategies that are transferable to other contexts.

The training for the research assistants is a key part. They meet weekly as a cohort and develop relationships with each other. They use activities such as role-playing and discussion to reflect on their own practice and use this as a means to think about how to support others. They also receive specialist training from librarians, e.g. from the Arts librarian. Research assistants are expected to act independently when working at the desk, so the peer network is really important for developing confidence. They are asked to reflect on their practice in research consultations and identify what went well and what could be improved.

Research assistants complete a self-reflection after each consultation, and these are collected, anonymised and analysed by library staff so they can monitor the practices of the research consultation and improve the training for the research assistants. Library staff have identified three key attributes of a successful consultation: Interpersonal communication, source selection and evaluation and self-reflection, with 3 levels - beginner, advanced and expert. 

Meredith shared an example of a self-reflection, which demonstrated a deep reflection on why a particular consultation did not go very well. It demonstrated that the research assistant had engaged with dialogic communication and had developed an advanced mode of engaging with the students and attempting to develop their search practice. Meredith shared another example of a research assistant reflection that was very perfunctory and didn't demonstrate that the research assistant was able to develop a dialogue with the students. One point of learning is that students bring a lot of emotion to their consultations, and it's OK to let the students vent their frustrations and be sympathetic listeners - this is as useful for some students as supporting them in developing a detailed search strategy. 

In the future, they will use this consultation reflection to inform strategic service development. There is potential for this service to be expanded, particularly to develop librarianship students, which will support them to develop as reflective practitioners. There is also the opportunity to develop the service in collaboration with student groups. 

Photo: student voice wall in the Cardiff University Centre for Student Life

LILAC Stories: exploring the long-term impact of the LILAC Conference on the Information Literacy community #LILAC25

Pam McKinney blogs Jess Haigh (@bookelf.bsky.social) from Leeds Beckett University presented her research:  The "LILAC Stories" project, which aimed to investigate the impact of the LILAC conference on the wider Information Literacy community, both for individuals and for institutions. Eva Garcia Grau also contributed to the data analysis. Jess undertook this research because she knew there was anecdotal evidence of the impact of the lilac conference, but this isn't enough for evidence-based decision-making, and it isn't research. Jess found a lot of literature about conference attendance - motivations, experiences and critical studies of conferences. However, there was less literature about the impact of conferences on attendees. Jess has been involved in the lilac conference committee for a long time, and they have found it tricky to evaluate the impact of the conference, but they wanted to demonstrate the value of the conference to employers in all sectors to support future applications for attendance and participation. Conferences enable access to temporary power, but it can also generate feelings of inferiority, shame, anxiety and fear. 

The impact of the conference depends on what delegates do after the conference with the new information they have gleaned. Jess spoke about the time it takes to do research and how she managed to fit this in around her full-time job. She didn't have a research supervisor or any funding to do this research. She had to gain ethical approval, and there were concerns about anonymity because the lilac community is quite small. There were 3 main methods for data collection - 25 online form submissions of "lilac stories", 14  online interviews transcribed automatically and a review of 70 conference reports that were created after the conference. Jess spoke about the challenges of the research - lots of people promised to submit lilac stories but didn't. The online team's transcriptions weren't high quality, and anonymising the interviews without losing meaning was hard. Jess used Nvivo qualitative analysis software, which really helped simplify the thematic analysis of the data. She used Zotero reference management software to support the research process. Another limitation is that it wasn't possible to acknowledge the way that the conference has been complicit in oppressive systems.

Papers presented at Lilac were relevant to the delegates and supported them to develop information literacy research and practice "I would describe it as a great big ideas party". Presentations are used to benchmark practice locally and globally. The information gathered at the conference leads to further academic work and publications. Delegates report a "critical awakening" leading to more critical praxis, and led to confidence to challenge academic staff. Keynotes were a significant point of impact and development for delegates. 

There were themes relating to the affective impact of the conference. First-timers can feel overwhelmed, and there was advice to take time to rest and process information. Attending Lilac can lead to professional validation, and feelings that their work matters and has value. It was clear from the data that there is a group of Lilac "fans", who gain significant benefit from the conference.

The social side of the conference was important. Connections made at the conference have led to professional collaborations, including research and publications. Sustained involvement in Lilac, e.g. on the committee or through regular attendance, has a significant impact on the careers of delegates. Attendance at the conference for many is dependent on bursary funding, either from the ILG or other partners. Getting a bursary can be instrumental in career development, research collaborations, or joining the committee. 

More research is needed on the experiences of global majority delegates, the impact of fandom membership on conferences, the impact of conference attendance on citation practices, and the voices of those who haven't been to the conference or have only been once and didn't come again.

Recommendations: make more bursaries available, recruit people to the committee who come from sectors outside of Higher education, and work with organisations outside of HE to host a conference. There is a need to encourage reflection on the value of the conference.

Photo by Pam McKinney: display at the CILIP stand at the conference

Informing bodies: embodied information literacy for conservatoire student singers #LILAC25

Pam McKinney here live blogging from the second day of the LILAC conference in Cardiff. Richard Douglas from Trinity Laban Conservatoire spoke about research that he undertook as part of his MA in Librarianship at UCL. Richard is a trained singer who started working in libraries and studied at UCL. He became interested in embodied information, drawing on the work of Annemaree Lloyd, who identified this corporeal information as an aspect of the information landscape of trainee firefighters and ambulance workers. There is a body of research looking at embodied information behaviours in serious leisure contexts, e.g. ultra running. Embodied information refers to information stored, processed, produced and interpreted by the body. Singing is a very embodied activity, bodies are central to singing practice, but also, in the context of the conservatoire, it is embodied information in an academic context, where singers become experts in using their voices. 

He used an interpretive qualitative study design using grounded theory. There were 4 participants - three students and 1 teacher. Participants were asked about their bodily information and their singing practice, focusing on their learning and progression and how they got better at using information. Participants were very engaged in the questions, and the data was very rich. Participants spoke about analogies and metaphors for information, pain as a key source of information, and listening to themselves singing. observing other people's bodies, the unreliable nature of hearing one own voice. A more reliable way to access information about the quality of the voice is to record it and play it back. Information activities acted as feedback loops, and then this could be used as a prompt to action. Even though singers can notice information, they don't always know what to do with it, but teachers can support this and help singers take appropriate action.

Richard noted that the study of embodied information literacy is still quite new and under-researched. This study has provided music educators with an information-based understanding of formal singing training, and provides some insight into the role of the teacher in developing information literacy. For librarians, it is important to recognise that singing students might have a high level of information literacy, but in a non-traditional way, we need to avoid a deficit mindset in teaching. We need to think of ways to connect their existing information literacy practices to more text-based information literacy that is more traditional in higher education. 

Photo by Pam McKinney - statue of a child in front of the Cardiff museum

Second keynote from #LILAC25: Jane Secker Reflecting on Information Literacy: Lessons from a Lifelong Advocate

Jane Secker was introduced by Nigel Morgan with a revision of his "Cephalonian method" which involved seeding questions in the audience for Nigel to answer to provide a background to Jane's career and information literacy work, it was a a very funny introduction to Jane, that matches the word cloud that Nigel and colleagues created for Jane (see photo below), writes Pam McKinney from the LILAC conference.

Jane introduced us to a writer, Brene Brown, who writes about speaking truth to power and putting oneself out there to communicate important values. Jane spoke about the current "information wars" and that we have lost a battle with truth with the prevalence of mis and dis information. This is concerning to the UK government - only 45% of UK adults said they were confident in judging the truth of the information they encountered online. We assume that people use their information literacy for good, but actually, there are highly information-literate people who deliberately spread misinformation. Jane used  Star Wars as an example - with librarians acting as the plucky Jedi with information literacy lightsabres. The film Dead Poets Society was another cultural reference. This movie illustrates the value of excellent teaching, and Jane reflected on her experience of being taught history as an inquiry in school, where she had to analyse evidence to try to determine the truth. Jane learnt about bias and propaganda and why these concepts mean that information literacy is so important. This led to Jane becoming a researcher, she was interested in how historians evaluated newspapers and whether it would be possible to digitise newspapers and make them keyword-searchable. 

Jane reflected on the value of libraries as places where people can freely access information and knowledge and shared a picture of the band the Manic Street Preachers, who had a banner behind them that said, "Libraries gave us power". It became clear to Jane when she was working as a librarian that information literacy was a vital personal competence, it wasn't just about the preservation of material, it was about being able to access it. Jane spoke about her friendship with Debbi Boden-Angell and how meeting Debbi sparked the creation of the LILAC conference that brought the nascent Information Literacy community together. She spoke about how Paul Zurkowski's initial paper sparked an entire information literacy movement with huge amounts of activity, models, research, and frameworks. Zurkowsli assumed that information would be locked away and would be hard to access, but in reality, information has become over-abundant, and is pushed at us in so many ways.

Advocating for information literacy has been hard. The value of information literacy outside the library community is poorly recognised, and in a paper by William Badke about why information literacy is invisible - he concluded that it was because academic assumes students will just learn information literacy by osmosis. In the UK, there is a recent school curriculum review which summarises competencies that students need to work effectively with information. However there is a proliferation of terms to describe new "literacies", and this forces us to have to justify our conception of the critical value of information literacy.

Jane spoke about the value of the LILAC community for her, and her work to connect with information literacy researchers and practitioners all around the world. We need to go outside our community and connect with others such as the Media and Information Literacy Alliance to have an impact on these complex problems the world is facing.

Jane spoke about doing a Postgraduate Diploma in learning and teaching in Higher Education and how the experience of doing this qualification was important for her career. Jane now teaches academic practice to lecturers and educational developers. Jane thinks that information literacy teachers are some of the most innovative educators in universities and encourages librarians to get a teaching qualification. She spoke about some examples from this years' LILAC conference of the innovative teaching that librarians are doing. 

Jane spoke about the importance of copyright in this AI environment where there is a perceived threat to artists from AI using their work without attribution or permission. There is a misconception about copyright law, and it is necessary for librarians to be informed about copyright law and to share this with library users. Jane encouraged us to share our information literacy teaching with each other, and ensure that it is available as Open Educational Resources for all to use.

Jane spoke about the need for us all to collect evidence of the impact of our information literacy work and how it supports learning. We need evidence that our teaching is making a difference to learners. In all the noise about critical AI literacy, it is important that Librarians are at the table where this is being discussed and that we have excellent teaching that encompasses AI literacy.

Jane's colleague Chris Morrison finished the keynote by playing a new song on his guitar that they wrote together to share the history and joy of information literacy. This was a great keynote that I thoroughly enjoyed and it brought a real energy to the conference - thanks Jane!

Jane has made her presentation available here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1skEEswue-ctVdcSvkyaj-HTRp0BiJdum

Day 2 #LILAC25: Reflection as a means to assess information literacy instruction

Veronica Arellano Douglas and Natalia Kapacinskas from the University of Houston shared a "teaching story" from their own practice blogs Pam McKinney, from day 2 of the LILAC conference. They designed a collaborative activity to support students to write a technical report for the fantasy scene in the movie "Up", where the house flies away connected to a cloud of balloons. The session first focused on a questioning approach to create a curiosity-driven session. Although they really enjoyed teaching this session and students seemed to get a lot out of it, ultimately, the only "measure" of the session was quantitative - a set of numbers that were reported to a library association. They gave a brief overview of learning assessment in academic libraries in the USA, moving from 2010 when the ACRL and other authors tried to establish how to assess the value of information literacy teaching. from 2013-2016, there were several attempts to link information literacy teaching to higher grades in students, but it was quite tricky to prove a causal relationship, and it was perceived to be correlational only. A lot of quantitative data is easy to collect, e.g. gate statistics, numbers in sessions, etc, but it does a poor job of illustrating the value of the library. From 2019 onwards, there was a lot more interest in qualitative measures of student satisfaction and how they perceived the value of the instruction they had received.

At the university, they wanted to delve a lot more deeply into their own teaching and how it could be assessed or measured. They wanted to introduce a value-based approaoch. The University of Houston is a large, publically funded university with high research activity. Within the library, there is a teaching and learning department with 7 librarians who provide information literacy teaching across the university. They are dedicated to the learning and growth of both themselves and their students. They played a recording from Mae Warren, who spoke about the department values - inclusivity, collaboration, authentic assessment, a critical approach, a reflective approach, experimentation and empathy. There is a culture of development and reflection for the staff, with lots of activity centred around professional development, collaborative development and peer support for teaching. Critical reflection is at the heart of all they do. A project started to look at critical approaches to assessment, and this led to the development of a reflective toolkit, which consists of a set of resources to support the teaching of information literacy. It encourages teachers to reflect on their teaching assumptions and think about how students learn. It encourages teachers to reflect on the different perspectives on their teaching, and draws on a broad variety of previous research and literature to create a thought-provoking resource. 

A student learning section provides resources to support the evaluation of student learning. It includes lots of ideas to encourage student reflection that can be applied in teaching sessions, for example, using reflective polls throughout a session. Another section of the resource focuses on supporting a process of evaluation of teaching. This toolkit is intended to be used over 2 years by teachers to develop themselves and their teaching. They shared some examples of how the toolkit had supported their professional development as teachers in a number of ways, for example, supporting reflection, addressing imposter syndrome, and developing their self-efficacy, being more mindful about teaching. It supports small improvements in teaching - noting that "it doesn't have to be big", but continuous improvement is something to aspire to. 

At the end of the year, they applied some evaluation of the toolkit and discussed a number of questions in their team, e.g. what have you learnt this year, what worked or didn't work, and what have you changed in your teaching practice. This was a great opportunity to share successful activities they had tried, for example, "sticky note plaudits", which encourages attendees at a session to write positive feedback about other people's comments at the end of a teaching session. There was a creative flavour to their reflection with one colleague writing a poem about the value of feedback. 

Year 2 of the toolkit focuses on student learning and how to encourage reflective approaches in various ways in classes. They noted that not all sessions were suitable for reflective approaches, but they are always thinking about ways to support them. 

Sheila and I include a reflective assignment in the information literacy module that we teach, and this presentation made me reflect (again!) on the value of reflection as a teacher, and that this assessment is a very useful way to build reflective skills in our student-librarians.

Photo by Pam McKinney: covid-era pavement sign to encourage social distancing in Cardiff

#LILAC25: I I can show you the (life)world: Qualitative techniques to examine women’s information experiences Laura Woods

Pam McKinney here live-blogging from day one of the LILAC information literacy conference in Cardiff, and I'm excited to be blogging this presentation from Laura Woods (@woodsiegirl.bsky.social), who Sheila and I have the honour of supervising at the University of Sheffield Information School. The presentation focuses on the methodology and preliminary findings from Laura's PhD study. Laura worked as Engineering subject librarian at the University of Huddersfield and has for a long time been interested in how engineering students engage with information in their studies. The information behaviour of females has been an under-studied phenomenon generally, and hasn't been studied in the context of engineering students. Laura defined information experience as a bridging concept to look at the intersection between information literacy and information behaviour, with information literacy being an applied concept and information behaviour as a research concept. The lifeworld is a concept from phenomenology that encompasses how we interact with the world that we often don't always recognise. 

Laura had a qualitative research design and aimed to recruit 15-20 participants from four different universities who represent a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Participants were asked to create an information diary in any format they wanted (e.g. photos, text diary etc) and then they were invited to a semi-structured interview to discuss their diary. Participants were recruited through engineering departments at each of the four universities, this was deliberate because there can be backlash from research focusing on gender in engineering. Email invitations were sent to all female students in each department. Participants were offered £30 incentive to take part which represented 2.5 hours at the UK living wage. Students who were interested in taking part completed a demographic questionnaire, and this enabled Laura to recruit participants from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of characteristics. Diary periods ranged from 2-6 weeks, most people kept a text diary, some added photos, one person kept a voice note diary. Some diaries were very detailed, others were just a few bullet points for each entry.

Initial findings from the pilot study (4 participants) revealed that participants experienced sexism and sexist micro-aggressions, but these were often downplayed. Group work was a common site for sexist attitudes and behaviours e.g. participants were blocked from taking on more technical tasks, or being asked to make a presentation "pretty". Participants had a preference for video-based learning materials and didn't talk about academic literature. The library was mentioned but only as a place of study, not a source of information. There was a strong reliance on lecture notes. People emerged as an important source of information - this mirrors the information behaviour of practising engineers. Often the person approached for information or help was carefully selected because to ask for help or information made participants feel vulnerable and ill-informed.

There was a lot of use of shared documents by participants to lead or control a group project, to make sure that all group members were contributing, and stop information hoarding by other group members. The participants seemed to have devised this strategy independently. AI was brought up by every participant (unprompted). All were using AI, but probably not in ways that would be problematic from an academic integrity perspective.  They mostly used AI to help them understand a problem or a concept that they didn't really understand. They say ChatGPT is a conversational study partner, partly because they felt they couldn't approach other students on their course for this chat. They were aware of the limitations of AI in terms of information hallucination.

Some reflections: Laura found it very useful to keep her own information diary, this helped give her clarity about what she was asking her participants to do, and it also gave her examples of an information diary to share with her participants. It was really important to pay participants for their time. It was important to be led by participants' needs and preferences e.g. diary format and online or f2f interview. Laura prepared a distress protocol, and this was important as some of her participants became distressed, Laura was able to draw on this to protect both her participants and herself.

Photo by Pam McKinney: Dragon sculpture in Cardiff

Day 1, afternoon session #lilac25: The Role of Emotion in Access to Information on Reproductive Health, Illness, and Disability: Implications for Information Literacy Instruction

Natalia Kapacinskas and Veronica Aellano Douglas from the University of Houston Libraries presented their work to explore the intersections between emotions, information access and information literacy and how that relates to information seeking for reproductive health, blogs Pam McKinney from the LILAC conference. "Emotion" is a complicated concept, it is an affective phenomenon which is discrete which suggest the existence of 6 or more basic emotions (e.g. sadness, happiness, surprise) or continuous as in they exist on a spectrum. Appraisal theory has become used to try to explain emotions as a functional state that prompts behaviours. This is related to information behaviour in that how does emotion support or prompt an information search. They take a social-constructivist perspective in their work.

Both authors are interested in disability, illness and reproductive health and the emotions associated with them, which seem to be inconsistent with traditional views presented in academic sources. For example, there is a narrative that disabled people should be "inspirational" to others, and families should be "disappointed" by disability and illness in their children. There is a narrative around "persistence" and "control" in relation to chronic illness. Reproductive health is associated with "determination" and a happy ending when challenges are overcome: there is always "hope". These narratives don't always reflect the reality of the emotional experiences of the people who have chronic illness, disability or reproductive health problems. There are "unacceptable" emotions such as frustration, violence, confusion, fear, shame anger and guilt. The prevailing narratives affect the information that is published, and therefore what information is available to be found.

Information marginalisation is the systemic process that pushes people to the margins of society, where their needs are overlooked. The presenters propose that social expectations of emotion exemplify information marginalisation, and this affects how people search for information. Information behaviour models do encompass aspects of emotion, but they don't consider the emotions of the researcher towards the topic, only the information search process itself, and this contributes to information marginalisation. The literature on health information seeking is a little more connected to emotions, however, information literacy models are not based on this literature and tend to assume that successful research requires controlled emotions. Holocaust librarianship, Indigenous information literacy and emotionally engaged research are more aligned with looking at the whole person and acknowledging these unpleasant emotions that might be rooted in a person's history or cultural situation. We need to take emotions, and their social and cultural context into account when designing information literacy teaching. For example, librarians need to recognise that the way information is sought might be influenced by defensive behaviours e.g. selected disclosure to protect a child from scrutiny. Online communities can provide a way to seek and share information from outside the traditional medical establishment. 

It is also important that librarians recognise their own emotional reaction to these health and illness-related topics and look inward to consider how best to support a researcher. This was a really thought-provoking presentation, which encouraged me to reflect on the relationship between emotion and information literacy.

Photo by Pam McKinney: Tree in bloom in Cardiff city centre

#LILAC25 first keynote: Dr Stephen Thornton - Light at the end of the tunnel? Twenty Years of Information Literacy in the Politics Classroom

This is Pam McKinney blogging the keynote focused on Stephen's 20-year journey investigating information literacy in the context of his teaching in politics. In the early 2000s, Stephen was working as a politics lecturer and noticed that students weren't just using material from the reading list but were going "off-piste" with their information sources. However often the sources used weren't very suitable, they were poor quality sources found on the internet. He was introduced to the concept of information literacy and recognised the value of this for both himself and his students. He started including some information literacy teaching in his modules, supported by the university librarians. This demonstrated the value of partnership working between academics and librarians to develop students' information literacy. The SCONUL Seven Pillars model informed the development of assessed tasks to support information literacy e.g. asking students to reflect on the process of writing their essays. However, some students had negative feedback about these assessments and found this aspect of their assessment tedious.

Stephen used a questionnaire with first-year students to try to evaluate their information literacy, including questions on how students assessed the quality of their sources. However, the students didn't really show any improvement between 2009 and 2017, which was disheartening, and brought into question some of the promises made about the value of information literacy development. The paradox is that the more complex and sophisticated information literacy becomes as a concept, the more unlikely it is to be used by academics in the classroom. Stephen was disheartened and was considering ceasing his information literacy work. 

Then he developed a partnership with a colleague, Doug Atkinson, who specialised in quantitative research and tried to establish a link between advanced levels of information literacy and better academic performance. They conducted a citation analysis of student work and established that more high-quality citations in an essay lead to higher grades, e,g. each high-quality journal article cited equalled 1 extra mark, if a government policy paper was cited, that led to a 2 mark increase. They distributed a questionnaire to politics lecturers and discovered that less than half of the respondents included and explicit information literacy education in their classrooms, and only 27% had invited a librarian to contribute. Research with postgraduate politics students has revealed that only a minority (36.1%) claimed that they had had any information literacy training, and emulation of "professors" is a successful information strategy. Wikipedia was a popular source for students, but they knew that their lecturers didn't like them to cite it as a source in their work.

There are signs from the political science pedagogical literature that there is increasing recognition of the value of information literacy development, some of it co-authored with librarians. Most of this literature is published in the United States. The rise of the use of Generative AI has scared academics, and perhaps provides a window of opportunity for librarians to promote information literacy teaching.

Photo by Pam McKinney: Exhibition banner at the Cardiff Museum

Live-blogging from #LILAC25! Darren Flynn: The information hinterland of UK academic librarians

 Pam McKinney here live blogging from the LILAC information literacy conference in Cardiff. Darren first gave an overview of the theoretical background to his research, specifically a sociocultural perspective that posits that IL is a socially situated practice that varies depending on context. It is based on discourse, information literacy is socially created based on interactions between people in social settings. Darren is aligned with the work of Annemaree Lloyd who defines information landscapes that are collaboratively created by the practices and interactions of the people that inhabit them. Darren then outlined the concept of the information hinterland, which again takes meaning from the geographical concept of the “hinterland” which is the land surrounding a particular place of interest. An information hinterland takes a rear-view focus, looking at what has come behind us, and the context that people apply to an information landscape, and how that might affect their engagement with an information landscape. Darren is interested in how background and previous experience – the hinterland. Darren draws on the work of Bourdieu, and the concept of social , economic and cultural capital and how these might influence information literacy. 

The central research question explored in this presentation is “what differences can be observed in the information literacy practices of academic librarians in the UK” A questionnaire was distributed to UK librarians, with 621 librarians respondents. Darren used latent class analysis, which is a multivariate technique which looks across variables in a data set to identify similarities between people and identify groups or sub-groups. The audience then took part in a short survey about holidays to provide data in order to illustrate the multivariate analysis. 

 Darren looked at social class and background of the respondents and identified four domains: the occupational background of the family when the respondent was a child aged 14; the education level of caregivers; the cultural consumption of the family e.g. family activities such as theatre trips and extra-curricular activities and lastly the social context e.g. what kind of people formed the social group of the family. The multivariate analysis identified three groups present in the data, and Darren was interested in discovering what differences there might be in their information hinterlands. 

In groups 2 and 3, the main earner in the household was in a professional occupation e.g. teacher, doctor, nurse, often working at a high skill level, with degree level qualification. In group 1, there were higher percentages of respondents from households where the parents worked in skilled trades, where they had a high level of training but did not hold a degree level qualification, and were more likely to only have GCSE level qualifications. In terms of cultural consumption, academic librarians tended not to be big consumers of sports, either participating or watching. In group 1, respondents did not engage much with the theatre or public arts, but respondents in groups 2 and 3 were high consumers of these types of activities, and also engaged with a lot of extracurricular activities – in sociological terms this engagement with extracurricular activities Is a means of gaining advantage. The most common newspaper read by households in groups 2 and 3 was the Guardian. Social context data revealed a split between groups: people in groups 2 and 3 knew more people who were working and higher skill level jobs, but people in group 1 did not know many people in high skill level jobs. Essentially, social groups corresponded to the skill-level of the family. The main differences between groups 2 and 3 was that people in group 2 had families that were more politically active than those in group 3, e.g. they were more likely to write to their MP, or sign a petition. These differences in background can affect the way that people engage with information landscapes. Darren questions whether traditional ways of thinking about IL which emphasise citizenship, privilege the kind of behaviours common in group 2. Darren argues that we need to understand this hinterland in order to inform information literacy teaching. It will be really interesting to see how Darren's research develops and how these categories inform the analysis going forward.

Photo: Daffodils in Cardiff 

Philosophy of information: articles and webinar on 17 April

Library Trends has published an issue (Volume 73, Numbers 1-2, 2024) of open access articles on the topic of Philosophy of Information. There is a webinar on 17 April 2025 at 10-11.00 (US Central time, so 16-17.00 BST) linked to this issue Design and the Philosophy of Information
More information about the webinar at https://ischool.illinois.edu/news-events/events/2025/04/17/webinar-design-and-philosophy-information 

The journal issue has the articles:
- Introduction: Design in the Philosophy of Information by Ken Herold
- Holistic Epistemology and Prospects for Design in the Philosophy of Information by Archie L. Dick
- A Reconsideration of Metatheories of Library and Information Science: A Chinese Information Philosophy Perspective by Lin Wang and Jiaxuan Duan
- The Fate of the Document in Library and Information Science by Steve Fuller - Truth and Agency: Rethinking the Definition of Information by Kathleen Lourdes B. Obille
- Re-Visiting the Revised Knowledge Pyramid by Aric Haas (the pyramid is the relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (DIKW)
Go to https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54307
Photo by Sheila Webber: ribes sanguineum white icicle, in bloom, March 2025

Call for proposals: Information Science Trends (IST) 2025: Creativity, Transformation, Empowerment

Do submit proposals (400 -750 word abstracts) for the hybrid conference Information Science Trends (IST) theme Creativity, Transformation, Empowerment, taking place 11-12 June 2025 in Manchester, UK and on Zoom. It is organised by the European Chapter (EC) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Deadline for submissions is 17 April 2025.
You can submit for talks (15 minutes presentation + discussion time) and students may also submit proposals for posters.
They "invite submissions within information science/studies (broadly construed) covering research (completed or in progress), practical projects or examples, and conceptual work. The theme encourages an exploration of ongoing changes in digitality and digital environments, benefits and risks of emerging information technology and functionality, and information seeking and use as it can help (or hinder) people in meeting their information-related needs in the information society (including but not limited to the European region). We welcome broad interpretations on the conference theme"
More information at https://www.asist.org/2025/03/22/information-science-trends-ist-2025-creativity-transformation-empowerment/
Registration (possible without a submission) is very reasonably priced (ASIS&T members free for online and $20 US for in person attendance; non-member students $10 and $20; other non members $20 and $40): https://www2.asist.org/ap/Events/Register/WqFz3mmUaCJCE

A teaching librarian

Today I highlight a long, thoughtful blog post from Alice Cann reflecting on "teaching as a subject librarian, including why and what, organising and planning and learning and reflection."
Go to https://researcherlibrarian.wordpress.com/2025/01/26/teaching-librarian/
Photo by Sheila Webber: cherry tree in the botanics, March 2025

GenderEd Coalition MOOC: Towards a gender sensitive Media and Information Literacy

The GenderEd Coalition has funding from the European Union to increase awareness of gender-sensitive Media and Information Literacy. They have a MOOC running between 1 April 2025 and 31 May 2025 Towards a gender sensitive Media and Information Literacy. It runs for 5 weeks, taking 10 hours a week of commitment and is in English
"This free online course is tailored for journalists, artists, media and information literacy (MIL) educators, activists, media professionals, gender experts, and researchers aiming to develop expertise in gender-sensitive practices, media analysis, and inclusive communication"
Presumably library and information professionals are also welcome!! There are four modules on topics such as "gender-sensitive communication, inclusive media practices, and combating gender bias."
Go to https://www.genderedcoalition.net/mooc
The main GenderEd website is at https://www.genderedcoalition.net/ and has some resources, and a Community of Practice that you can join.
Photo by Sheila Webber: yet more magnolia blossom, March 2025

Recent articles: media & digital literacy; podcasting

An open access journal I don't think I've covered before, Media and Communication. Each annual volume consists of a number of special issues, and this latest one (volume 13 issue 467 2025) is on Balancing Intimacy and Trust: Opportunities and Risks in Audio Journalism including, for example
- Trust in Pod: Listener Trust of News Content Heard on Different Genre Podcasts by Kristine Johnson and Michael McCall
- Intimacy in Podcast Journalism: Ethical Challenges and Opportunities in Daily News Podcasts and Documentaries by Elvira García de Torres, José M. Legorburu, David Parra-Valcarce, Concha Edo and Lilly Escobar-Artola
Go to https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/issue/view/467 

Even more relevant to this blog is an issue of volume 13 (issue 466, January 2025) on Evaluating and Enhancing Media Literacy and Digital Skills including
- Fostering Media Literacy: A Systematic Evidence Review of Intervention Effectiveness for Diverse Target Groups by Leen d'Haenens et al. (I shall pause here just to sigh and point out that this is yet another sysytematic review that does not even notice - despite there being 23 authors involved - that they failed to search for INFORMATION literacy, although they searched for online, internet and media literacy and variations thereof. I assume that none of the 23 was a librarian, who might have pointed this out. It's a shame, as this is otherwise an OK review of quantitative studies)
- Effects of a News Literacy Video on News Literacy Perceptions and Misinformation Evaluation by Rita Tang, Melissa Tully, Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga
- Exploring Media Literacy Formation at the Intersection of Family, School, and Peers by Nika Šušterič, Katja Koren Ošljak and Veronika Tašner
- The Effectiveness of an Educational Intervention on Countering Disinformation Moderated by Intellectual Humility by Eduard-Claudiu Gross and Delia Cristina Balaban
Go to https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/issue/view/466
Photo by Sheila Webber: blossoms almost faded, April 2025

Survey for review of the ACRL Information Literacy Framework

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Review and Revision Task Force has a survey open to consult on the Framework and consider revisions. It has been open for a few weeks (apologies!), so probably a good idea to respond promptly. It asks you about how you use different bits of the framework, whether you think anything is missing, whether you find it straightforward to understand etc. The survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PRT5FMX
Photo by Sheila Webber: more magnolia, March 2025

Registration open for #WILU2025

Canada's information literacy conference, WILU, takes place in person in Hamilton, ON, Canada, 9-12 June 2025, and registration is now open. I would recommend this conference:  I really enjoyed attending WILU last year.
More information at https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/wilu2025/

Information Literacy cakes

An information literacy cake-baking competition was organised by the Australian organisation CAVAL in October 2024, to celebrate 50 years of Information Literacy, and coinciding with the CAVAL Research and Information Group's (CRIG) annual event. You can find pictures and information about all the inventive cakes here https://www.caval.edu.au/activity/crig-seminar-2024-cake-competition/
If you are not interested in cakes, there are pdfs of some presentations from the actual event (Information Literacy is Turning 50: Advocacy, Inclusion, Empowerment) here and here
Winning cake: The Lighthouse, created by Sarah Charing, Sophie Kollo, and Jane Jilbert (The University of Melbourne)

Generative Artificial Intelligence Skills in Schools

On 18 June 2025 at 13.30-15.30 BST there is a free in-person workshop Generative Artificial Intelligence Skills in Schools (GenAISiS) in Glasgow, Scotland. "The workshop will report on the results of GenAISiS, a project funded by Responsible AI and delivered by a team of researchers at Robert Gordon University in partnership with CILIPS (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland) and school library professionals across Scotland." 
More information at https://www.cilips.org.uk/events/genaisis/
Photo by Sheila Webber: narcissi, April 2025