IL marketing/education for law: BIALL conference

Yesterday I gave a talk, Information literacy: marketing and educational views … and some research, at the British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) conference, held here in Sheffield. Sheffield celebrated by tipping down with rain (so I paddled to the conference dinner!) and although it had cleared up by yesterday, there were still problems with the trains (flooding) so the audience for my almost-last-in-the-conference talk was reduced. It wasn't actually as bad, though, it looks in the photo below (of previous speaker David Connolly): the plenary sessions were in Sheffield City Halls (capacity 2000, see entrance in first photo) so the 200+ delegates were inevitably somewhat spread out.

I have uploaded my presentation to Slideshare, and you can get it here. The abstract I put on Slideshare is as follows: "Sheila identifies a tension between the librarian's role as marketer and educator, and proposes relationship marketing as a context for lessening this tension. Research into chemistry and marketing academics' conceptions of information literacy is described. Sheila proposes how this might be applied to a legal environment, and says that understanding your clients’ approaches to information literacy could be fruitful for training and marketing. The presentation finishes by giving highlights into recent research by O'Brien and Rhodes into legal information professionals’ priorities for information literacy research." Slideshare provides some code to embed the presentation in your blog, but when I tried it just now it crashed the browser and lost the post, so I'm not trying that again today!

There was a question afterwards about the research technique that James O'Brien and Chistopher Rhodes used in their study (which was done as the main coursework for the IL Research module). This was the Delphi technique, and there is some more info about it on (where else) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method