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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Information needs in the financial sector

The latest issue of Information research has just come out. One article which caught my eye was:
Miranda, S.V. and Tarapanoff, K.M.A. (2008). "Information needs and information competencies: a case study of the off-site supervision of financial institutions in Brazil." Information research, 13 (2) http://InformationR.net/ir/13-2/paper344.html

Although they weren't dealing explicitly with information literacy, it seems to me that the "competencies" are essentially information literacy. Much of the information that their research subjects needed was packaged and chanelled to them using information systems. However they still needed skills in:
- making sense of the mass of information;
- analysing it to make decisions;
- recognising new information needs;
- using information management tools to handle the information.
My own interpretation of this is that the research subjects were using, in terms of the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of information literacy, Pillar 1 (Recognising the information need) and later pillars (e.g. Pillar 7: Synthesise and create). It reinforces the idea that, to prepare learners for workplace information handling, it is important not just to focus on the search/retrieve parts of information literacy education
Photo by Sheila Webber: sand crab patterns, Yeppoon, June 2008

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