#LILAC24 Serendipitous searching: taking art students on a visual research journey

Pam McKinney here live blogging from the second day of #LILAC24 information literacy conference in Leeds. Karen Fisher from Leeds Beckett University presented on Serendipitous searching: taking art students on a visual research journey

How can we embed serendipity in information literacy teaching? Karen Fisher discussed 3 ways to accomplish this. The first involved developing student competence with visual literacy and find images from credible sources.  Students took pictures around campus and then used the photo as a starting point for a research journey, to encourage using images to search. Karen used a phot she had taken as an example and encouraged students to think about words that could be used to describe the photo and open up discussion about keyword terms and narrow and broad terms.  Then students used these words to search on the art store database and chained through images of interest on a visual journey of inspiration.

The second approach was called "the incident room" a teaching design for 2nd year students which allowed the students to present their research in a visual way. This positioned the student as a detective, they were asked to design a re-purposing of a specific building in Leeds.  One week the students had a session on literature searching, and in the second week, the students presented their research to the "chief inspector" librarian as a visual record. This gave the librarian ther opportunity to give feedback and suggest other avenues for research.

The final example is focused on browsing in the library, to encourage students back into the library post-covid, and to use the library stock. They created an area in the library that would be attractive to students and collect journals and magazines that are only available in print to display in this area. The librarians encouraged the academics to also use the space, and bring students in for seminars to get them used to browsing the visual resources.  There is an issue with just searching online as the search is mostly text-based which is quite narrow and doesn't open up access to more visual resources appropriate to art and design students.