Two new articles on Information seeking - IS of Lithuanians in time of war; IS of business students

Wilson, T.D. & Maceviciute, E. (2025). Information seeking in a time of war: coping with stress in Lithuania during the Russia/Ukraine war. Journal of Documentation 80(7), 31-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2024-0156 ; "A majority of participants experienced moderate to high levels of stress associated with the war in Ukraine. Information seeking and discussing information found with family members and friends played a significant role in helping to moderate stress. Most of the participants understood more than one language and, consequently, were able to compare local information sources with international sources. Only five participants were active users of social media, the rest were critical of these sources. All participants valued those sources they believed to be reliable and truthful."

Vinyard, M., Morales, I & Helton, E. (2024). Information seeking behavior of graduate business students: using a qualitative approach to determine the role of the library. Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship. https://doi.org/10.1080/08963568.2024.2435758 "Librarians interviewed 15 graduate business students to understand their information-seeking behavior. Google emerged as the primary research tool, though students encountered paywalls and credibility concerns. Their research skills were shaped by prior work experience, and the depth of research expertise varied according to their bachelor’s degrees. Students were more likely to seek assistance from classmates and professors than librarians. Faculty guidance and database usage varied significantly, impacting students’ use of library databases. Student’s ability to interpret financial and economic data was a significant issue."
Photo by Sheila Webber: another snowy scene from November 2024.

Design Thinking; Citation styles #ECIL2023

As my final session at ECIL I attended and liveblog Information Literacy in the Design Thinking process – A Preliminary Research was presented by Dorota Rak (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland). She identified that design thinking can be seen as a mindset, a methodology or a problem solving philosophy. Rak say that it was “a manifestation of collective intelligence” where students are designers and also use innovative designs. There are three aspects – the institutional area, the operational area (e.g. with tools supporting the design thinking process) and the didactic area. Rak said that librarians had recognised the value of integrating DT, that DT can be a driver of information behaviour, and also that DT can be used to develop practice and learning. Rak identified that IL was “a vauable competency for nuturing social capital”. 
The research problems that Rak addressed were – what information competencies do students need for DT; what tools do they need; what skills do they need. Data was collected through a questionnaire administered to university students and also examination of the literature. The majority of the respondents had a good understanding of both “Information Literacy” and “Design Thinking”. The majority also were able to define their information needs across the DT process. However, some stages were seen as more difficult and in more need of support.
The students were asked how useful they found obtained information across the stages of the Design Thinking process. There were differencies across the stages and also between students on the 2 different programmes surveyed. There were also differences in terms of organising information, and use of different tools. Conclusions included designing a curriculum that effectively integrated information management principles with the dynamic iterative nature of DT. 

The second presentation was “Who Cares?” Defining Citation Style in Scholarly Journals from Pavla Vizváry (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) and Vincas Grigas (Vilnius University, Lithuania). Grigas started by identifying that there are more citation styles (10 thousand) than species of birds! The identified problem is that there are all these styles, you have to follow a style strictly in published journals, people are not expert in all styles, so so authors make mistakes. This is a problem as it’s a burden to authors, but inconsistency makes it more difficult to find articles etc. Their aim was to identify citation styles required by journals in SCOPUS. They had questions such as how cleraly the journals express their requirement. They analysed 270 journals, looking also for types of mistake in citation. They were aiming to understand how different stakeholders (e.g. authors, publishers) are affected. Also they used cognitive load theory – worries about formatting can divert energy from the main task of writing.
Vizváry took over to return to the question of “Who cares”? The answer included publishers, editors, librarians, authors and teachers. Introducing SCOPUS, they looked at Lithuanian and Czech journals and also sampled journals published in other countries, comparing their statistics (such as H index). From this statistical point of view the Czech and Lithuanian journals were similar to each other, but had a slightly different profile to the international sample. Vizváry also noted that there were more English-only journals published in Lithuania and Czech Republic than national language ones, and there were differences in the patterns of open publishing. Moving on to differences in form of intext references (numbers or author names) there were significant differences by subject, and this was more important than differences from country to country.
The most common journal reference style is, sadly, “unnamed” i.e. they just give examples, next was APA. They noted that the ISO format was strong in the Czech Republic, but not elsewhere. In social sciences APA was named a lot, but “unnamed” was the most common in some subjects. 84.4% of journals give example references (others tend to link to the style’s website). They also noted that not all journals include DOIs in their reference styles. There was a question afterwards about whether the “unnamed” styles were actually specific styles, and the authors said that they’d tried some unnamed styles in ChatGPT and it had said in each case that it was like style X, but with these differences. They were thinking of doing more of this ChatGPT-aided diagnosis.

Photo by Sheila Webber: sleepy pigeons in Krakow

#Libraries, museums and Media and Information Literacy #GlobalMILweek #MILcities

I will liveblog a few snippets from a session on Revitalizing city libraries museums and archives through creative MIL actions, from the feature conference of Global Media and Information Literacy week. Aleisa Fishman (Levine Institute for Holocause Tducation, USA) talked about an educational exhibit they had developed on how the Nazis used propaganda, with material available to help educators teach students about the issues arising from that. "We wanted visitors to be better consumers of media". She referred to the website which they had collaborated to produce: Mind over Media https://propaganda.mediaeducationlab.com/node/1 which focuses on issues such as recognising propaganda, and analysing propaganda. It also has an interactive element.
Kyoko Murakami (Director of the Asia-Pacific Media and Information Literacy education Centre) talked about Empowering future citizens through MIL in city libraries and social network services. She started by highlighting how libaries are using social media. She went on to talk about the Japanese situation, identifying how everyone is using smartphones, with a dramatic change in the way they use the internet. A map of Japan showed coverage of the internet - with the big concentration on big cities, in particular Tokyo. In terms of use of social media, it is a minority of city libraries that use it. She showed a slide (see picture) which had some characteristice of library use. She used the University of Tsukuba as an example of effective use of social media, a video of a robot helper at a public library, and also use by the National Archives.
She summed up issues for libraries: that communication was mostly one way; that libraries were seen as unattractive; and that only a quarter of Japanese were confident in evaluating information (from one research study). Murakami advocated collaboration with other stakeholders, more understanding of effective use of social networking applications, education for effective use of these applications, and more participative use of the services by libraries.
Monika Straupyte (Culture Manager for Public Relations, Kaunas Municipal Vincas Kurdika Public Library) talked in particular about their computer classes for seniors (with several thousand participants) and their Media and Information Academy for seniors (with 36 participants, 60-80 years old). Activities varied from searching, to editing and uploading. She said that they learned about dangers as well as opportunities. This helped the seniors to become "full members of society". The MIL academy also included public lectures on topics such as fake news. They also had a course in MIL for librarians.
Viorica Palamarciuc (IREX Europe) talked about, in particular, librarians becoming ambassadors of MIL in Moldova. 113 librarians have been trained, so they can then carry out activities in their own (I think, rural) communities. They have organised over 250 events for over 3000 people. They have set up "media corners" in libraries in some cases. She also talked about activities with young people in Moldova.

Elsevier focus on information literacy

Short articles on information literacy by Elsevier customers feature in the latest issue of their newsletter, Library Connect. There are stories from various countries e.g. "Information competence development for Lithuanian academic community" and "Back to basics: Sheetal Tank [an Indian librarian] builds an information literacy program to address core skill levels." There is a blog entry listing the individual articles here and the pdf of the whole issue is at http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/sites/default/files/lcn1003.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: autumn leaf, October 2012