Previous blog entries urged readers to sign the Information Literacy petition being presented to the Scottish Parliament. John Crawford now writes"The Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament met on Wednesday 21st December, and I attended with Christine Irving and Chris Milne. In the end the petition attracted 710 signatures in total; 415 were from Scotland, 186 from England, 31 from Wales and the rest from other parts of the world. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who signed. It strengthened our hand greatly.
I made a short opening presentation in which I drew attention to the worldwide interest in the petition. We then answered questions for about half an hour and it was clear that the committee members were genuinely interested in the issue and had given it some thought. These included:
* What research and development activity is taking place
* Should information literacy be implicit or explicit in the curriculum
* Do librarians feel undervalued and are they just trying the raise their image
* Who will take responsibility for information literacy within the curriculum
After the questions there was some discussion about how to progress the issue and it was decided to put it out for comment to relevant trade unions, Universities Scotland, and relevant specialist bodies such as Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) and The Scottish Qualifications
Agency (SQA). It has to be said that Christine and I are in contact with many of these bodies already but a letter under the banner of the Scottish Parliament will carry a lot more weight than we can. The collated responses will come back to the Petitions Committee for further consideration."
Photo by S. Webber: Sunset on the Grand Canal, Venice, Dec. 2005.