Pam McKinney here live blogging from the LILAC information literacy conference in Cardiff. Darren first gave an overview of the theoretical background to his research, specifically a sociocultural perspective that posits that IL is a socially situated practice that varies depending on context. It is based on discourse, information literacy is socially created based on interactions between people in social settings. Darren is aligned with the work of Annemaree Lloyd who defines information landscapes that are collaboratively created by the practices and interactions of the people that inhabit them. Darren then outlined the concept of the information hinterland, which again takes meaning from the geographical concept of the “hinterland” which is the land surrounding a particular place of interest. An information hinterland takes a rear-view focus, looking at what has come behind us, and the context that people apply to an information landscape, and how that might affect their engagement with an information landscape. Darren is interested in how background and previous experience – the hinterland. Darren draws on the work of Bourdieu, and the concept of social , economic and cultural capital and how these might influence information literacy.
The central research question explored in this presentation is “what differences can be observed in the information literacy practices of academic librarians in the UK” A questionnaire was distributed to UK librarians, with 621 librarians respondents. Darren used latent class analysis, which is a multivariate technique which looks across variables in a data set to identify similarities between people and identify groups or sub-groups. The audience then took part in a short survey about holidays to provide data in order to illustrate the multivariate analysis.
Darren looked at social class and background of the respondents and identified four domains: the occupational background of the family when the respondent was a child aged 14; the education level of caregivers; the cultural consumption of the family e.g. family activities such as theatre trips and extra-curricular activities and lastly the social context e.g. what kind of people formed the social group of the family. The multivariate analysis identified three groups present in the data, and Darren was interested in discovering what differences there might be in their information hinterlands.
In groups 2 and 3, the main earner in the household was in a professional occupation e.g. teacher, doctor, nurse, often working at a high skill level, with degree level qualification. In group 1, there were higher percentages of respondents from households where the parents worked in skilled trades, where they had a high level of training but did not hold a degree level qualification, and were more likely to only have GCSE level qualifications. In terms of cultural consumption, academic librarians tended not to be big consumers of sports, either participating or watching. In group 1, respondents did not engage much with the theatre or public arts, but respondents in groups 2 and 3 were high consumers of these types of activities, and also engaged with a lot of extracurricular activities – in sociological terms this engagement with extracurricular activities Is a means of gaining advantage. The most common newspaper read by households in groups 2 and 3 was the Guardian. Social context data revealed a split between groups: people in groups 2 and 3 knew more people who were working and higher skill level jobs, but people in group 1 did not know many people in high skill level jobs. Essentially, social groups corresponded to the skill-level of the family. The main differences between groups 2 and 3 was that people in group 2 had families that were more politically active than those in group 3, e.g. they were more likely to write to their MP, or sign a petition. These differences in background can affect the way that people engage with information landscapes. Darren questions whether traditional ways of thinking about IL which emphasise citizenship, privilege the kind of behaviours common in group 2. Darren argues that we need to understand this hinterland in order to inform information literacy teaching. It will be really interesting to see how Darren's research develops and how these categories inform the analysis going forward.
Photo: Daffodils in Cardiff
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