Two Years of Information Culture Development for Supporting Higher Education #ecil2015

Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo gave the next talk I'm liveblogging from the European Conference on Information Literacy 2015 in Tallinn, Estonia. It was entitled: Two Years of Information Culture Development for Supporting Higher Education: Initiatives, Teacher’s Perceptions and Future Actions.
Information Culture is identified by his university (CETYS Universidad, Mexico) as important for students (it is in the strategic plan), and has resulted in an Information Culture (IC) Development Programme. I would say their definition of IC is broadly similar to information literacy. Initiatives are divided into three axes, including subject guides, support of online courses, joint activities between librarians and academics, flyers, videos and (in the axis todo with research support) citation and communication support guides (including courses on publishing etc). They use the SAILS and iSKills assessment tools. There is also an evaluation strand to the programme.
As part of this latter activity, they have interviewed 8 academics and collected questionnaires over 2 years of implementing the programme. Looking at the interviews with academics; they were aware of the initiative but fuzzy about what exactly the scope was and how it differed from other library activities. However, they felt that there were positive changes in the libraries because of the programme, and there seemed to be better links between academics and librarians. It was agreed that IC needed to be better integrated into curricula and the academics gave some specific suggestions.
In conclusion, so far they have been aiming at developing basic IC skills. They have also found that there are fewer barriers when the activities as regarded as challenging (e.g.publishing) so help is welcomed. However, there are still a good deal of challenges in reaching students. They have identified that more promotion and communication has needed. There are opportunities e.g. as the university is moving more towards as a research orientation, and librarians can offer support.