Visitors from University of Konstanz

On Monday I had a visit from two German researchers, Oliver Kohl-Frey (Information Literacy Coordinator, left) and Bernd Schmid-Ruhe (Project Manager, right) (they are pictured on West Street, just by the Department, about to catch a taxi). They are involved in an interesting series of projects at the University of Konstanz (see photo of brochures below). The first one was looking at information literacy education for undergraduates. The second one, that they are involved in at the moment, is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and focuses on those above the undergraduate level.

It is called Informationskompetenz II (or "Information Literacy 2"), with the subtitle Joint Project on Comparative Research in Information Literacy for advanced students and staff. They were asking for my views on various aspects of information literacy. I must still be dazed from last week - I felt afterwards I hadn't asked them enough about their project.

However, there is a lot of information about the project (note: in German) at http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/bibliothek/projekte/informationskompetenz.html. It includes material for several modules, available under a creative commons licence, namely:

Module 1: Die Welt der wissenschaftlichen Information (the world of scholarly information)
Module 2: Suchstrategie und erste Recherchen (search strategies and first searches)
Module 3-5: Bibliographien und Datenbanken I-III (bibliographies and databases)
Module 6: Internet
Module 7: Literaturverwaltung und eigenes Publizieren (managing your information, and publishing your own work)
Plus there is a section with information that is relevant across several modules, and documents that give overviews of all the material (e.g. an outline that identifies learning outcomes, materials and activities over all the modules).