Sunday, April 01, 2007

My presentation at LILAC on the IL research literature

The last few days have been hectic, as I had to dash back from the LILAC conference on Wednesday to a rather heavyweight faculty learning and teaching committee meeting. Then the next day (29th) Dr Christine Bruce arrived in Sheffield from LILAC and Bill Johnston arrived from the his home University, Strathclyde (in Glasgow). On Thursday afternoon, Christine, Bill and I had some good conversations about information literacy, and the evening we were joined by some colleagues here (plus Ruben Toledano, who is pursuing a PhD on an information literacy theme at Robert Gordon University under the supervision of Professor Dorothy Williams; I am his external supervisor).

Anyway, to return to last Tuesday at LILAC: I gave a presentation co-authored with Bill Johnston, Reviewing the information literacy literature, highlighting issues emerging from a review of the research literature funded by the Higher Education Academy. In particular we talked about the research evidence on collaboration between librarians and academics, and also identified some issues in the research literature concerning the impact of information literacy. The powerpoint (in pdf form) is here: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/lilac-2007-webber.pdf. We identified that, although there are many articles which mention collaboration and say how essential it is, there are not many which actually investigate the collaboration itself. We note some ways in which people could explore this topic. We also discussed some of the issues with articles that look at "impact", including the over-emphasis on quantitative approaches.

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