SCONUL Working Group meeting

Last Thursday I attended the SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy, in London. I’ve been a member of this Group for a couple of years now (see http://www.sconul.ac.uk/activities/inf_lit/). We have meetings just a few times a year and its always interesting to meet up with other members. In part of the meeting we were looking at how we were going to develop a new position paper on information literacy, including reviewing what has been done with the “SCONUL 7 Pillars model” of information literacy.

Another item was a report from Gill Needham, at the Open University, who had been invited along to talk about the Evidence Based Librarianship conference that she had attended in Brisbane, Australia, late last year. The conference website has already been a link in the blog, but here it is again as there are a number of interesting papers: http://conferences.alia.org.au/ebl2005/conferencepapers.html In terms of evidence based librarianship, this is an area that we will be contributing to via the SCONUL/HEA research review (http://infolit-review.blogspot.com/) not least because the evidence based librarianship movement has tended to put most emphasis on experimental forms of research, and a good deal of good research in our discipline is qualitative research. Therefore there is lots of scope for helping people identify “good” from ... “less good” qualitative research (as opposed to dismissing it all because it’s not got statistics in it!)

Photo by S. Webber: Dusk, Oxford Street, London (the lanterns are part of the Chinese New Year celebrations), Feb 2006.