Recognising the need

This week has been very hectic and I realise that I still haven't posted up my PowerPoint from the conference at Staffordshire University. In fact my ppt, together with that of some of my copresenters are available now on the conference website at http://www.staffs.ac.uk/infolitconf/ You click on the speaker name to get to a page with links (for Andretta, Corrall, Boden, Bent or Webber). Susie Andretta's page also has reports from the breakout sessions. There some conference pictures: this one http://www.staffs.ac.uk/infolitconf/photos/infolit3.jpg includes me (third from the right with the long hair, my colleague Sheila Corrall is to my right). I have posted my own ppt Working towards the Information Literate University, as a pdf as well here. Pam McKinney (who had a poster about CILASS at the conference) wrote a little about Susie's talk (here). Moira Bent was talking mostly about the Information Literacy Forum at Newcastle University, which has encouraged academic staff to take more of an interest in developing information literacy initaitives. Debbie Boden talked about the need for librarians to have skills to support information literacy, and the virtual learning environment they have developed at Imperial College for this purpose. Sheila Corrall was identifying how startegic management theories could be applied to develop information literacy (afterwards a management lecturer from the audience came up and said how refreshing it was to see theory being advocated as practice!)

There was a book published of the proceedings: Walton, G. and Pope, A. (Eds) Information literacy: recognising the need. Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent: 17 May 2006. Oxford: Chandos. ISBN 184334243X. £20 (for 63 pages) In my chapter, as well as expanding on what I talk about in the ppt, I list some factors or characteristics of universities at different levels of information literacy. This was something I worked on after I came back from Australia in 2002 but never got round to writing up properly. "Recognising the need" is the first of the SCONUL 7 Pillars of IL, by the way.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Mosaic water feature near Sheffield Hallam University.