IL strategy

Another report of a paper from the Lifelong Learning conference in Yeppoon, Australia (see right for photo of fisherman on the Yeppoon beach). Clare Granville presented a paper by her and Rae-Anne Locke of Griffith University. They undertook a survey of the information literacy activities of librarians at their university and also interviewed them about what they would like to be doing. They found that librarians reported involvement in roughly a third of the degree programmes at Griffith. 52% of activities were in timetabled lectures and 34% in workshops or tutorials. There was a lot of involvement in first year, but less evidence of activities that were progressing information literacy through degree programmes.

In the interviews, librarians said they would like to do more e.g. “The approach I’d like to see is more integration with the curriculum, more developmental.” However, there wasn’t a clear strategy of how to achieve this. To move forward from this position, a planning day was held for Griffith librarians, with involvement of the educational developers at Griffith too. They reflected on the results of the IL surveys, started to reformulate their definition and vision for IL at Griffith, and identified strategies and targets for IL. One of the lessons for me is that you need to keep working on and revisiting your strategy for IL even if it feels like you are doing quite well, as Griffith had developed a “Blueprint for IL” relatively early (1994), has done a good deal of work in this area, and, as can be seen from the survey, has achieved quite a bit compared with some universities. You might like to look at their Information Literacy toolkit at http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/gihe/
griffith_graduate/toolkit/infoLit/why.htm which has quotes from students, examples of assessment etc.

The paper was called “Crossing the divide: information literacy values and practices of Griffith University librarians.” In due course the ppts will be made available on the LLL conf website