IFLA is encouraging library and information professionals to provide information about their work in countering mis- and disinformation. The United Nations (UN) Department of Global Communications is collecting information on activities which could be said to contribute to the Suistainable Development Goals (SDGs). Deadline for submissions is 31 December 2025.
"Are you working on topics advancing the role of information in achieving the SDGs? Are you working on helping library professionals and users counter mis- and disinformation related to climate, peace and justice, health, or any of the other topics covered by the goals?"
"Describe your action, its goals, methods and target audience. Indicate if its planned, ongoing or completed. Is your action research oriented, building public awareness, Media and digital literacy training, or something else? Share the primary focus area. Indicate which SDG(s) it targets
Your input will contribute to a cataloguing of activities that help showcase good practices, share achievements, identify gaps and inform policy guidance."
Go to this page and follow the link https://www.ifla.org/news/are-you-addressing-mis-disinformation-and-the-sdgs-share-your-actions-with-the-un/
Photo by Sheila Webber: autumn branches and sun, October 2025
Choo, C.W. (2023). Climate change information seeking. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 74(9), 1086-1099. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24805 (open access)
"This research develops and tests a model of individual intentions to actively seek information about climate change. ... We conducted an online survey in which 212 participants in Canada and the United States responded. The results showed that the model was able to explain more than 40% of the variance in intention to seek climate change information. Social Norms, Affective Response, and Social Trust were the most important variables in influencing intention to seek climate change information. We conclude that climate change information seeking has a strong social dimension where social norms and expectations of relevant and respected others exert a major influence, and that the individual's emotional response towards the risk of climate change is more important than the individual's cognitive perception of how much information they need on climate change."
Park, M. et al (2023). Measuring the impacts of quantity and trustworthiness of information on COVID-19 vaccination intent. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 74(7), 846-865 https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24760
"We analyzed COVID-19 Preventive Behavior Survey data collected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Facebook users (N = 82,213) in 15 countries between October 2020 and March 2021. The results of logistic regression analyses indicate that reasonable quantity and trustworthiness of information were positively related to COVID-19 vaccination intent. But excessive and less than the desired amount of information was more likely to have negative impacts on vaccination intent."
Wu, C., Zhang, Y., Wu, J. et al. (2023) Construction and application on the training course of information literacy for clinical nurses. BMC Medical Education, 23, 614. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04505-9. (open access)
"This study intended to construct a training course of information literacy for clinical nurses, train nurses in order to improve their information literacy level and provide theoretical reference for the training of information literacy courses for clinical nurses. Two rounds of Delphi study were conducted for the study among 26 clinical medical and nursing experts as well as educational experts from 5 different provinces and cities in China. ... 84 clinical nurses from two hospitals were selected by the convenience sampling method, of which the nurses in one hospital were the control group and the nurses in the other hospital were the observation group. 42 nurses in the observation group were trained by the constructed information literacy training course. Questionnaire evaluation was used to compare the differences in the level of information literacy of nurses and the training effect between the two groups. ... The results of the empirical study showed that the information literacy level of the nurses in the observation group after the training of the information literacy course was improved, and the scores in nursing information awareness, nursing information knowledge, nursing information ability, and information ethics were significantly higher than those in the control group after training" The article mostly does not refer to information literacy lterature, but they did use the information literacy instrument used in this open access research article https://doi.org/10.1111/hir.12217
Photo by Sheila Webber: Closeup of fabric "leaves" from the steel willow I showed yesterday
It is extraordinarily hot in England and Wales today, so climate change seems an obvious topic. This article from UNESCO talks about climate change literacy as part of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) and this page https://en.unesco.org/covid19/communicationinformationresponse/visualresources includes some posters that are about MIL and climate change (scroll down the page to find them: one example is used here)
As some more examples:
- Hauke, P. (2018). From Information Literacy to Green Literacy: Training Librarians as Trainers for Sustainability Literacy. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2018 – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Transform Libraries, Transform Societies in Session 116 - Library Theory and Research with Information Literacy. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2147 This talks about development of green literacy or sustainability literacy as one of the goals for a sustainable library (practicing, and educating for, sustainability).
- Dailey, A. & Smith, M. (2017). From Climate Change to Vaccination Safety: Teaching Information Literacy in an Undergraduate Epidemiology Course. All Musselman Library Staff Works. 76. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/librarypubs/76 This leads to an abstract and a powerpoint you can download. It describes a collaboration between a faculty member and a librarian on an assessment targetting information literacy, with a scenario on climate change being one topic the students had to investigate. In fact the climate change subject isn't described in detail, but the powerpoint has a good amount of detail about the intervention and the results, so I thought it was still worth mentioning from a "teaching information literacy" point of view.
- Lovitt, C. & Shuyler, K. (2016). Teaching Climate Change Concepts and the Nature of Science: A Library Activity To Identify Sources of Climate Change Misconceptions. In: Integrating Information Literacy into the Chemistry Curriculum. (pp. 221-246). ACS Symposium Series. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bk-2016-1232.ch012 A priced publication, but it looks an interesting example "A library activity was developed in which students found information about climate science misconceptions from popular and scientific literatures. As part of the activity, students developed a rubric to evaluate the credibility and type of literature sources they found. The activity prepared students to produce an annotated bibliography of articles, which they then used to create a training document about a climate science misconception for staff at a local science center."
- Duru, P. & Emetumah, C.F. (2016). Evaluating the Effects of Information Literacy on Climate Change Awareness among Students in Imo State University. Archives of Current Research International, 4(3), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.9734/ACRI/2016/27186 A questionnaire was administered at a Nigerian university: the questions were mostly to do with knowledge about the impact of climate change, but there were also questions about how the students got information about this topic and whether they felt it was sufficient.
The latest issue of the open access International Journal of Librarianship (vol. 5 no. 2) is an interesting one with the theme of Sustainability and Libraries. Articles include The Use of Social Media Instagram to Disseminate Sustainable Information; Sustainable Development Goals: Insights from Research Libraries; Managing a Sustainable Work-from-Home Scheme. Go to https://journal.calaijol.org/index.php/ijol/issue/view/12
