#FestivIL presentations and recordings

The archive for the FestivIL by LILAC event (held in July) is available on the LILAC website. The archive contains links to all the pre-recorded content, including our main stage speakers Emily Drabinski, Barbara Fister and Alison Hicks with students from UCL, plus presentation slides and posters from the event (live sessions were not recorded). The archive is open to all, whether you attended FestivIL or not https://www.lilacconference.com/lilac-archive/festivil-by-lilac-2021
The pre-recorded videos are on the FestivIL Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNURkbkVe5bZY_2SRNlD_l9D_n31B3mzG

Information Literacy in the QAnon Era #FestivIL @bfister

On the final day of FestivIL (yesterday), the keynote was from Barbara Fister. Her prerecorded lecture took up the theme of her Project Information Literacy Provocations essay - Information Literacy in the QAnon Era. When it is made public I will embed the video here. One thing that struck me particularly was the point that QAnon (the North American movement that rejects scientific evidence, conventional news sources etc.) gives the same type of advice as librarians: that you should be sceptical of sources, do your own searching etc., which is rather scary.

In terms of the live session on the 8th July, the usual caveat is that - this is my impression, and I'm not covering all that was discussed. In this live session, Fister started talking about her own work with information literacy as librarian in a North American university, and how it had to keep changing because of developments in media, scholarship and publication. She also referred to her involvement in Project Information Literacy over the past few years. Fister went on to talk about the intersections between her perspective on information literacy, and the perspective that emerged in Drabinski’s video/session. One of the messages at the end of Fister's introduction was the need to “dial down” on telling people not to trust anything, putting more emphasis on discussing why you need certain information practices and why, and how, you can trust some information more than others. 

One of the questions from a delegate, in the live session, was how community outreach could help in information literacy education. Fister reflected on how she could have done more on this (for example, partnering with the public library), given that Project Information Literacy (PIL) showed that students learnt from each other and were interested in the concerns of communities outside academia. She also mentioned an intervention in which students were engaging with older people, with some older people wanting to take the information literacy materials and share them with their own community groups. There seemed a lot of scope for connecting with different kinds of community groups, as outreach work. 

Another question was - Is empowering students a key to motivating them for IL? Fister again pointed out that people in QAnon may spend a very long time searching for information, and so there were certainly examples of people being motivated! Fister thought that empowerment was valuable, but not really enough - some other guidance was useful (in making decisions about what was valuable/trustworthy etc.). She also referred to the moment when a student starts to really care about the subject or investigation they are doing; that owning the subject was a big help in motivating them to care about IL. PIL had shown that PIL had shown that students didn’t feel that what they learnt at university had helped them much with IL at work. Fister reflected that it would be valuable to do more to understand and trigger that curiosity and ownership at university and helping students to carry that attitude through to the workplace. 

There was a question about students’ relationship to news, and amongst other things Fister talked about how the students PIL researched felt they were in a special position (because they hadn't had access to social media when very young, and now were steeped in it more than some in older age groups). They felt that made them critical of social media; they were flooded with news, and felt they needed to manage it and navigate it, because they were engaged with issues of the wider world such as climate change. This created stress, making a sort of conflict between what they engaged with in class, and this engagement with news and outside issues. There was an opportunity to connect these two areas of students' lives in information literacy education (and other parts of their learning). 

There was more discussion and also a lot going on in the text chat, including: role/training of journalists; challenges of information literacy education in schools (e.g. in getting support from teachers and administration for more information literacy); issues around engaging learners with open access materials; and how you can stimulate intrinsic motivation. 

Some of the links mentioned in the chat were: The FOSIL group, Ofcom's report on news consumption, the Select Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies' report on Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust and a book: Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

Secondment; Food & activity tracking #FestivIL

In one of the lightning sessions today at FestivIL. Sara Hafeez gave a talk Firstly Wait a Secondment! Some reflections on information literacy, inclusivity, and invisible barriers in which she introduced a project (quoting from the abstract) "of a secondment in Library Services at University of Westminster. This project was started in 2019, where the use of secondment opportunities was embraced by Library Services at Westminster. Deepa Rathod, full-time in frontline facing Customer Services team, won the 0.5 secondment to Academic Liaison & Learning Development team."

So this was aiming to get over the problem of working in silos, and learning more from people in different teams. Hafeez found herself thinking - what is it about information literacy - what are the invisible barriers that stop people from being information literacy specialists - and what does inclusivity really mean? (when it sometimes gets used in a rather empty, routine way). The discussion after this talked about various aspects of siloing (barriers to getting different types of job, for example), the place of job descriptions (and keeping them up to date), expectations of what librarians are willing to do, the usefulness (or not) of library qualifications, how valueable it is to make (for example) interview material and processes more accessible to everyone - and a number of other things!

My colleague Pam McKinney talked about The Information literacy of food and activity tracking in 3 communities: parkrunners, people with type 2 diabetes and people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The abstract was very informative, so I will include that! "There is increasing interest in the use of mobile apps and devices to track aspects of diet and health and wellbeing activity, and research has shown that use of apps can motivate people to adopt healthy behaviours, including a healthy diet, increased physical activity and weight loss. Information literacy is crucial to the safe and effective use of tracked information in this landscape. In this research study, an online questionnaire was distributed to members of 3 distinct communities: members of the parkrun organisation, members of the IBS Network charity and members of the Diabetes.co.uk online community. The aim of the research was to discover the tracking practices of people in these communities and to understand nature of information literacy in this landscape (McKinney et al. 2019). The survey was distributed in early 2018, and 143 responses were received from parkrunners; 140 from Diabetes.co.uk and 45 from the IBS Network. The data showed that there were clear differences in the tracking practices of the members of the three communities, and differences in motivations for tracking. Developing information literacy in this landscape is centred around four interrelated areas (Cox et al. 2017): 1) Understanding the importance of quality in data inputs; 2) Ability to interpret tracking information outputs in the context of the limitations of the technology; 3) Awareness of data privacy and ownership; 4) Appropriate management of information sharing. These four areas are explored for each of the participant communities, and the distinctive nature of food and activity tracking for each community, and the commonalities across the participant groups are identified. Implications for the support of information literacy development in everyday life are presented."
Cox AM, McKinney PA & Goodale P (2017) Food logging: an information literacy perspective. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(2), 184-200. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-12-2016-0208
McKinney P, Cox AM & Sbaffi L (2019) Information literacy in food and activity tracking among three communities: parkrunners, people with type 2 diabetes and people with IBS. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21(8). https://doi.org/10.2196/13652

Teaching the Radical Catalog #FestivIL

I'm attending the virtual conference FestivIL (three half days, today until Thursday) and I will do a little liveblogging over the next 3 days. The format for a number of sessions was to have a prerecorded video, that people are supposed to view in advance, to have more time for discussion on teh day. The keynotes are all in this format, and the first is from Emily Drabinski on Teaching the Radical Catalog
In her video, Drabinski talked a bit about her own history & position, and then gave us illustrations of the problems with cataloguing, classification and indexing systems - using examples relating to gender, sexuality, and the family. However, she also identified the practical problem that learners needed support, and just rejecting these tools was not going to help them learn, thus "This is the task of the critical information literacy instructor: I want to teach you both how this system is reflective of power, and these are the tools that you need in order to get what you need" This can mean "teaching students about the catalogue as a text", so that they both get information (e.g. how to find a book) and learn to critique the tool they are using. For example, the way in which the book is indexed may obscure its revolutionary, radical subject, and thus make it irretrievable if you are searching in these terms. By surfacing and discussing these issues the information literacy librarian can raise learners' understanding of systems and power strucures, and how they impact people's lives.  

In the session itself, the focus was on addressing questions posed by participants, in advance or on the day. The following is just my own interpretation of what was said, so please don't treat it as authoritative, also I'll just mention a few questions. The first question was - is it possible to develop cataloguing & classification systems in this day and age, and can you get rid of what is there already? How viable are cataloguing and classification as skillsets? Drabinski recognised the difficulty of creating the system in the first place (dismantling it is not a simple thing), and also that there is value in creating metadata that really does describe items so you can get hold of them (even when so many are googling). This led to a discussion about the problematic corporate nature of Google; and ideal classification schemes (and the problem of creating one that is truly inclusive and meeting everyone's needs). Later on, issues around actual physical organisation of the collection were mentioned - and how it was more difficut than, say, changing subject headings.

Another question was "How do we have this conversation with people who are more traditional?" which it was agreed was a really useful question, but challenging to address! One idea was that because the catalogue was not "personal" it could be a less emotional way of getting talking about the issues of difference and exclusion.

The session chair (Jess Haigh) highlighted a key idea of Drabinski's talk - wringing what you can out of the system. There is also the issue of what you do after you've come up against the limit of your system - and have to "figure out how you change the picture". 

Another question was about balancing the perspectives of author, patron (and some other group, sorry I didn't catch it) - and Drabinski said that there was a need to think about the way in which someone might want to find or might describe an item, and not just represent the document by the way the author chooses to identify it (this seemed to reinforce the idea that you need to be open in seeing an item from different perspectives). 

Altogether a stimulating session and I'll add the link to Drabinki's video when that's made public after the conference.

Looking forward to our #FestivIL panel! The UK agenda for Information Literacy Research #FOILResearch

I had a great zoom call this morning (how often can you say that!) with fellow members of FOIL: Forum on Information Literacy, a collaboration of academic researchers based at UK institutions, working our initial draft of a research agenda for Information Literacy in the United Kingdom. This will be the topic for our panel session at FestivIL by LILAC (if you have a ticket - they are now sold out - our session is at 11am UK time on 7 July 2021 - the programme is here).

I am chairing the panel, and the other FOIL members, who will form the panel on the 7 July, are: Dr Pam McKinney (a colleague in the Information School, University of Sheffield; Professor Annemaree Lloyd, Dr Alison Hicks and Dr Charlie Inskip from University College London, Bill Johnston from University of Strathclyde, Dr Drew Whitworth from Manchester Institute of Education, Manchester University, and Dr Geoff Walton from Manchester Metropolitan University.
We are putting together a document with position statements and ideas on the focus for IL research in the UK, and aim to collaborate with others to develop it further. I will be posting more about this in the future!