Information Literacy for the 21st Century

At the INFORUM 2010 conference in Prague on May 25-27 I gave a presentation on Information Literacy for the 21st century. It did have some elements in common with my Lisbon presentation, but also some parts are different (e.g. it brings in more references to academic material, and expands the explanation of the definition of information literacy).
- There is a paper of about 2000 words I wrote to accompany the presentation: http://www.inforum.cz/pdf/2010/webber-sheila-1.pdf
- Here is an interview for student radio, where I was interviewed by Tomáš Bouda, on this page: http://www.inflow.cz/zvukove-zpravodajstvi-z-konference-inforum (scroll down to see my interview)
- This is the actual presentation:

Information Literacy for the 21st Century

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Department creating their own "library"

Another snippet from the INFORUM conference: Antonie Doležalová, University of Economics, Prague - Faculty of Public Administration, Czech Republic talked about “A Little Bit Different Seminar: To Be His Own Librarian”. (Links to paper and presentation (in Czech) and English abstract at http://www.inforum.cz/proceedings/2010/62)
This presentation was in Czech, and I listened to simultaneous translation, so this is only a short summary. This described a project where the Economics Department at the university put material online at http://www.bibliothecaeconomica.cz/ with various kinds of material. They were digitising the material and also “cataloguing” it though I think the library intervened a little in terms of improving keywords etc. It seemed interesting in terms of an academic department and a library cooperating, with useful new material being added to the collection and using the subject expertise of the staff and students in the Department. Also it gave some opportunity (I think) for on-the-spot information literacy education, in terms of legal issues to do with publishing information, and issues of findability.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Transport, Prague, May 2010

Search engine wars: let battle commence

Karen Blakeman, a UK information expert, talked about the warring search engines and developments in search at the INFORUM conference in Prague, from which I am selectively reporting. In the early days of the web I used to do regular seminars on business information sources and search engines, with detailed handouts. Karen's concentrated burst of updated information reminded me that I've got lazy, since I've stopped noticing all the changes on search engine screens, and thus probably haven't been using all the features.

Karen concentrated first on the "big 3" of Yahoo, Bing and Google. She started with focus on Yahoo, highlighting to the way it gave options for refining your search on he left hand side. It now uses Bing as its underlying search engine (a change). She liked the fact that it gave you a simply-presented search results page. However some people feel that it may not be developed much in future.
Bing, Microsoft's engine, by contrast, has had a lot of development. However, a lot of special features are only available on the US version. Special features include "recent tweets" "top shared links" and "related searches". Results tend to be more consumer-oriented. For Karen, who does business-related searches it was "information hell", since apart from the consumer-orientation, the search commands worked unpredictably.
Google adjusts results according to what you searched for in the past and searches also vary depending on the country you are searching from (I certainly noticed that searching here in Prague!). Features include "latest news" and if you are logged in to your "social circle" (social media) then results for that will be filtered in too. Various search options are shown down the left hand side after you have searched. Karen also talked about the wonder wheel function. (this is something about which I noticed very lively debate on the ili (US information literacy) list recently: people were suggesting using it to get people to think about search strategy). Karen identified issues with the refinements to do with the timeline feature, in that Google essentially grabs a date that looks prominent. These features were talked about in more detail by the next speaker at the conference, Vilem Sklenak.
Summing up: results are getting messier, in the engines' efforts to deliver more refinements. Social media results are increasingly being included, but are not comprehensive.
Therefore Karen talked about some alternatives: iseek - clusters into categories, and there is an "education" option; Biznar real time federated search of selected business sources, and it also organises into categories. It is a bit slower, but it is looking in the deeper web, so that is understandable. More specialised still were http://www.search4oil.com - oil and gas exploration; Chemspider; Healthmash (Karen was concerned that it filtered results too much and was doubtful about its top hits); http://www.guardian.co.uk/world-government-data "a better way of searching government statistics sites!".

Karen recommended Phil Bradley's powerpoint on searching social media sites at http://www.slideshare.net/Philbradley/social-media-search-engines(which does indeed look excellent and was presented a couple of weeks ago. She did pick out silobreaker.com, search.twitter.com and twazzup.com

Karen's slideshare is at http://www.slideshare.net/karenblakeman, her blog is at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/ and her website with its information sources guide at http://www.rba.co.uk/
Photo by Sheila Webber (photoshopped): coffe and cake in Prague

INFORUM 2010

I have been speaking at the INFORUM 2010 conference in Prague, Czech Republic 25-27 May. http://www.inforum.cz/en/ or in Czech http://www.inforum.cz/cs/ and there is a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/INFORUM-2010-Conference/309426798874 and twitter stream at http://twitter.com/search?q=%23inforum10 though it mostly consisted of informative tweets from Karen Blakeman (a speaker) when I just looked.
Just in general: INFORUM is a well-established annual event, which has hundreds of delegates and a good atmosphere (for older people, it reminded me of earlier days of the UK's Online conference). It started with an amusing "panel session" with spokespeople from Heaven, Hell and Purgatory talking about their ideas of information hell, purgatory and heaven (see Karen's tweets for pictures). However then it got down to the more serious business of electronic journal publishing. This is an electronic information conference rather than an information literacy conference, so I will just blog a few things. This is my first pick.
Eileen Lawrence, of Alexander Street Press, talked about How Students and Faculty are Using Streaming Media in the Classroom: How Does a “Playlist” Become an Online Publication or Course?
She was talking about creating playlists for use in teaching. Alexander Street Press have, in particular, a good amount of classical recordings, and some educational videos, but also a wide range of other material. They make it fairly easy to search the existing content to put together playlists of different kinds of material. In some cases they have got transcripts of audio/video and division into scenes so you can select particular parts of a video rather than the whole thing. I think the usefulness is in having an interface for putting it together easily (rather than using Netvibes etc.) and that all the copyright clearance has been taken care of, and you know it is ok to use in class.
She used the example of the Czech Composer Leos Janacek, and putting together a list with a biography, score, audio recording of a piano sonata, and a video of the Cunning little vixen. As well as linking to their material, you can bring in other web links too. She gave examples of people using playlists for library promotion and for supporting study. People reuse playlists, but you have to be an Alexander Street subscriber to have access to them.
The speaker mentioned a webcast Video in the Library: Trends and Best Practices at http://www.libraryjournal.com/webcastsDetail/2140496488.html. Incidentally, it's worth bookmarking the page for Library Journal webcasts since they are free events that they hold fairly regularly and you can look at archived webcasts if you register.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tomas Bouda, who interviewed me after my talk: on the laptop is his Second Life avatar Zdenek, who I had already me in Information Literacy Week in SL last year.