Clear blue sky

The sky was such a perfect blue today I couldn't resist photographing it on my way into work (right). Unfortunately I didn't get to see much of it, especially as my room has practically no natural light. Today included talking to individual students about their business information assignments which are due on Monday, having a good meeting with Moira Bent from Newcastle University about her IL projects (see earlier blog entry), and giving a lecture on information literacy in the workplace to 2nd year students. In particular, I was linking IL with Knowledge Management (which is a key topic of that class). Unsurprisingly, I stressed how effective KM (of whatever flavour or school) is difficult if you don't have information literate staff. Three recent papers I cited were:

Crawford, J. (2006) “The use of electronic information services and information literacy: A Glasgow Caledonian University study.” Journal of librarianship and information science, 38 (1), 33-44. (Includes results of an alumni survey - alumni thought IL was v. useful in their jobs)

Lloyd, A. (2005) "Information literacy: different contexts, different concepts, different truths?" Journal of librarianship and information science, 37 (2), 82-88. (reporting on her "information literacy of firemen" study, which identifies "information in the body" - e.g. how colleagues handle and use equipment in an actual fire - as a vital element that they have to be literate with)

Wang, M-Y. (2006) "The impact of information culture on managing knowledge: a double case study of pharmaceutical manufacturers in Taiwan." Library review, 55 (3), 209-221. (Includes discussion of IL in the two companies)