Information literacy research

My Information Literacy Research module is running for the second year. It is a small class, eight students (from the MA Librarianship and MSc Information Management programmes), but I think that is OK for a specialist area like this. Last week one of last year's students, Rachel Adams (pictured right), came back to talk about her dissertation research, which was on information literacy needs in a public-sector legal department.

This week we are focusing on focus groups. Phussadee Dokphrom, one of my PhD students, will talk about the pilot focus groups she conducted recently at Silpakorn University, Thailand. The participants in her study were undergraduates and she was investigating their experiences of information literacy. Then we will carry out a focus group in class and reflect on how it went.

I'll mention a couple of items about focus groups:

Krueger, R.A. (no date: 2000?) Focus group interviewing. University of Minnesota. http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rkrueger/focus.html (Krueger is author of a book on the topic)

Walden, G. (2006) “Focus group interviewing in the library literature: a selective annotated bibliography 1996-2005.” Reference services review, 34 ( 2), 222–241.