Celebrating 20 years of the Information Literacy Weblog

6,425 posts, 5.2 million page views ... the Information Literacy Weblog has been publishing c. 300 posts a year for 20 years. Looking at the first post, we said "Hi, This is a temporary blog created whilst The Information Literacy Blog (at http://ciquest.shef.ac.uk/infolit/ since April 2003) is being found a new home. ... We hope to have a new home as soon as we can!" Well, it hasn't been so temporary!

The old blog (2003-2005) ceased because it was run under LaTeX was on an old server, and the person who was supporting it moved jobs. Some pages from have been archived in the Internet Archive (e.g. this home page from June 2004, which has a report from a workshop in Yeppoon, Australia and reports from the LIDA conference in Dubrovnik, e.g. this one. I was busy in those days! BTW the internet archive links can be slow to respond, so patience is needed). Initially Stuart Boon provided some posts, and latterly Pam McKinney has joined me in liveblogging conferences, but otherwise the posts are devised and written by me (Sheila Webber).

The tagline of the old blog 2004 was Sharing relevant items and information relating to information literacy worldwide, which became the slightly snappier We bring you news and reports about information literacy around the world to start with on this blog. In due course (i.e. I can't remember when) I changed this to Curating information literacy stories from around the world since 2005. You may have noticed that I have now added a further tagline "Stories identified, chosen and written by humans!" since nowadays it seems worth pointing out that there is human agency both in deciding what to blog and in writing the posts. 

It seems unlikely that I will still be blogging in 20 years time, but I intend to keep going for now!

Information Literacy Weblog, the AI podcast

I can't resist sharing an AI-generated podcast created with Google's NotebookLM. I simply pasted in this blog's address and after a few minutes there was a podcast of 8 minutes in which 2 people with American accents left no cliche unused whilst highlighting some of my recent posts.
On the plus side, they do provide mostly accurate information about upcoming conferences, some resources and an award that I'd recently blogged. Some of their comments are rather nice, and it is good at giving a non-expert view on information literacy matters, which could help explain why IL was an interesting topic.
On the minus side: they can't pronounce "LILAC" (seriously! it's even a real word!), and instead invent something called the Information Literacy Association; some of their lighthearted banter is (IMHO) painful/boring; and I got the impression they are pretending to be interested, so that curiosity and enthusiasm that you get in the best podcasts wasn't really there. But then, they are AI!
The AI-generated episode description was "The source is a blog called "Information Literacy Weblog," maintained by Sheila Webber. It features a collection of posts about information literacy, covering topics such as upcoming conferences, new publications, and recent research. The posts highlight events, articles, and resources related to information literacy across various sectors, including academic libraries, schools, and the public. The blog also showcases the use of artificial intelligence in libraries, data literacy, and other emerging topics in information science."
In fact the most useful thing, for me, was the idea that I could do weekly few-minutes overviews of what's on my blog. I've been wondering how to promote it on media that isn't X/Twitter, as I don't want to spam everywhere every day, and this could be a good solution. Watch this space!
Anyway, here it is: https://digitalmedia.sheffield.ac.uk/media/AI+Generated+podcast/1_88mihabt

 

5000th blog post on the Information Literacy Weblog

Today I'm celebrating 5000 blog posts on this Information Literacy Weblog. The first blog post, on 5th September 2005, started "This is a temporary blog"(note 1) - my predictive powers were obviously pretty poor that day. In the blog's early days Stuart Boon also blogged here and latterly the blog has gained from conference blogposts from my colleague Dr Pam McKinney, but otherwise the posts are by me. At time of writing this post, the Blogger counter records 2,695,807 page views (note 2).

I have dithered about how to mark this milestone (that's why I haven't blogged for a few days!) but I've decided to have a series of reflective posts, thinking about was going on, and what I was posting, then and now. I have started by identifying a few then-and-now facts, below. There are advances in information literacy in 2021 (for example more journal articles, more accessible webinars, conferences and specialist groups, and in more countries - not so focused on the West). However, there are other changes: for example, much less IL activity in Australia (which led in IL research and practice at the start of the millennium, I think) and the disappearance or stagnation of some specialist groups (such as ENIL and the SCONUL group). 

Bill Johnston and I reflected on the development of information literacy in Webber & Johnston (2017) so I won't go over that ground again, but in future posts I'll do a bit more analysis of themes and events, then and now. Of course, what is on this blog reflects my own preferences, conceptions, biases etc. as well as pragmatic decisions I make on how much time to spend on the blog!

In 2005 there were not: (1) Any journals dedicated to information literacy (Journal of Information Literacy and Communications in Information Literacy both started in 2007 and NORIL in 2009);
(2) Online conferences and webinars about information literacy;
(3) The IFLA Information Literacy Section (the first Standing Committee meeting was in 2009).
(4) As many journal articles about information literacy (see e.g. Pinto, Escalona-Fernandez & Pulgarin, 2013)

In 2005 there were: (1) Lots of information literacy conferences: The LILAC conference (the first one was in 2005), WILU, LOEX plus various other conferences in Australia, Sweden, Canada, the UK and so on - there were also calls for papers for the 2006 Lifelong Learning conference in Australia, the 2006 Creating Knowledge conference in Denmark and Les Rencontres FORMIST in France.
(2) Proclamations from UNESCO on Information Literacy - the initiative really kickstarted with the Prague Declaration in 2003, and in November 2005 the Alexandria Proclamation was produced.
(3) Specialist groups and networks, including the European Network on Information Literacy (ENIL) (which launched its 2nd international survey that year and had in 2003 published Information Literacy in Europe: a first insight into the state of the art of Information Literacy in the European Union) and the SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy
-------------------------------

References: Pinto, M., Escalona-Fernandez, M.I. & Pulgarin, A. (2013). Information Literacy in social sciences and health sciences: a bibliometric study (1974-2011). Scientometrics, 95, 1071-1094. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0899-y 

Webber, S., & Johnston, B. (2017). Information literacy: conceptions, context and the formation of a discipline. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(1), 156-183. https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/JIL/article/view/PRA-V11-I1-9

Note 1. This blog was a continuation of one of the same name, started in 2003 and hosted on a unix machine at Sheffield University, which closed for technical reasons (i.e. the person who did unix left), and the earliest post on this blog is a repost from there (on the pedagogy of Harry Potter)

Note 2. To be honest, this 2,695,807 is likely to include a chunk of denial-of-service spam views. However, I think a reasonable percentage are hits from actual human beings.

23things for digital knowledge #23ThingsEdUni

The University of Edinburgh has just started a 23 things initiative (where you are introduced to a new "thing" and normally have to do an activity and blog about it). The digital knowledge "things" are: Thing 2: Blogging; Thing 3: Digital Footprint; Thing 4: Digital Security; Thing 5: Diversity; Thing 6: Accessibility; Thing 7: Twitter; Thing 8: Facebook; Thing 9: Google Hangouts/Collaborate Ultra; Thing 10: Wikimedia; Thing 11: Copyright; Thing 12: Open Educational Resources; Thing 13: Video (YouTube/Vimeo/MediaHopper); Thing 14: Audio (Podcasts/SoundCloud); Thing 15: Digital Curation; Thing 16: OneNote/ClassNotebook; Thing 17: Geolocation Tools; Thing 18: Augmented & Virtual Reality; Thing 19: Altmetrics; Thing 20: LinkedIn / Academia.edu / ResearchGate; Thing 21: Online Games & Learning Tools; Thing 22: Fun and Play; Thing 23: Reflection. (Thing 1 is "introduction: not sure that's a real thing!)
You can still get a lot out ofit if you are not at Edinburgh University (if you ARE then there is access to extra videos, and prizes).
http://www.23things.ed.ac.uk/
Photo by Sheila Webber: taken in the Deathrow Designs shop in Second Life (TM Linden Lab)

My liveblogging limited at #wlic2017

My planned liveblogging at the World Library and Information Conference will be hampered by the fact that I broke my left wrist 12 days ago and it is in plaster (see photo). Although I am right handed, I have realised that I use my left hand a lot when I'm typing fast. Although my fingers are ok,using a key board involves a good deal of wrist action... I am going to see how it goes, but I am likely to be doing a very limited amount of liveblogging (which requires fast typing). It was a straightforward break (I overbalanced when getting on a tain in a hurry and threw out my hand to support myself) and normal liveblogging service should be resumed by the European Information Literacy Conference at the end of September (I hope!)

New articles: badges; reflective writing

The latest issue of SCONUL focus (open access) mainly has items relating to librarians' Continuing Professional development, but it also includes:
Rizvi, M. (2016). Been there, done it, badge it! Information literacy and the use of digital badges at Middlesex University. SCONUL Focus, (67), 89-93. (an interesting short article as the cohorts targetted were in the UK and in China).
Additionally there is an article about reflective blogging, referring to library students, but the points could also apply to other cohorts: Burns, J. (2016). Pedagogical approaches to teaching blogging and reflective writing to library school students. SCONUL Focus, (67), 17-19.
The issue is at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/page/focus-67
Burns refers to an article in which a former colleague of mine discusses how we use reflection on a module here at Sheffield University iSchool, so I will cite that as well:
Sen, B.A. (2010.) Reflective writing: a management skill. Library management, 31(1–2), 79–93. (the open access version is here: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/10336/)
Photo by Sheila Webber: apple, October 2016

Social media and libraries: Twitter and more

Firstly, Alison Skoyles reported back yesterday on an informal survey of library Twitter use she did on lis-link discussion list (asking e.g. what libraries used it for, how often they tweeted): https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1511&L=LIS-LINK&O=D&P=38476

Secondly, The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science (volume 39, no. 3/4: priced publication) has a special focus on Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Era of the Participatory Social Web. It includes:
- Preface: Archives, Libraries, and Museums in the Era of the Participatory Social Web in English and French by Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan, Elaine Ménard
- Influence, Reciprocity, Participation, and Visibility: Assessing the Social Library on Twitter/Influence, réciprocité, participation, et visibilité : Évaluation de la bibliothèque sociale sur Twitter by Lorri Mon, Jisue Lee at http://bit.ly/cjils393_4d
- “Library 2.0” Viewed through the Prism of the French Librarians’ Blogs/La « Bibliothèque 2.0 » vue à travers le prisme des blogs de bibliothécaires français by Bérengère Stassin at http://bit.ly/cjils393_4e
- Social Media in Libraries and Archives: Applied with Caution/Les médias sociaux dans les bibliothèques et les archives : Appliqués avec prudence by Chern Li Liew, Shannon Wellington, Gillian Oliver, Reid Perkins at http://bit.ly/cjils393_4j
Photo by Sheila Webber: house near Kumu, Tallinn, Estonia, October 2015

New Issue: Information Research: Buddhism, workplace competencies, blogging, cancer patients

The open access journal Information Research (volume 20 no 2) has been published. Articles include:
- Marta Zárraga-Rodríguez and Maria Jesús Álvarez Information practices and competences that evidence information capability in a company
- Nicole M. Gaston, Dan G. Dorner and David Johnstone Spirituality and everyday information behaviour in a non-Western context: sense-making in Buddhist Laos
- Kalyani Ankem Assessing cancer patients' health information needs: a standardized approach
- Jenny Bronstein and Maria Knoll Blogging motivations of women suffering from infertility
- Polona Vilar, Primoz Juznic and Tomaz Bartol Information behaviour of Slovenian researchers: investigation of activities, preferences and characteristics
- Meng-Hsiang Hsu, Chun-Ming Chang, Hsien-Cheng Lin and Yi-Wan Lin Determinants of continued use of social media: the perspectives of uses and gratifications theory and perceived interactivity.
- M. Asim Qayyum and David Smith Learning from student experiences for online assessment tasks.
http://www.informationr.net/ir/20-2/infres202.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: wild strawberries in my garden, June 2015

Readings for 2015! #ilread

The blog post infolit journal club is starting up again, and four of us have posted some planned readings for 2015 at http://infolitjournalclub.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/ilread-in-2015-have-your-say.html Do add your own suggested information literacy readings in the comments to that post!

Library Innovation: new articles

The latest issue of the open-access journal Library Innovation (volume 5 no. 2) includes the following:
- Learning Through Play, the Old School Way: Teaching Information Ethics to Millennials by Lucinda A Rush ("The author describes the process of creating an innovative game based on Candy Land to teach undergraduates about information ethics and makes recommendations for creating non-digital games for instructional purposes based on this experience."
- Using Blogs in the Library to Reach Diverse and Non-Traditional Student Groups by Amy Nelson Decker, Monya D. Tomlinson
- Channeling Passions: Developing a Successful Social Media Strategy by Elizabeth Ramsey, Amy Vecchione
Also one of the book reviews is of: Buchanan, H. and McDonough, B. (2014). The One-Shot Library Instruction Survival Guide. Chicago: ALA Editions. ISBN: 978-0-8389-1215-7.
http://www.libraryinnovation.org/issue/view/29
Photo by Sheila Webber: Gorgeous autumn beech leaves, November 2014

One million page views

During the #ecil2014 conference this blog hit one million page views (since it started in 2005): perhaps no big deal if you are Lady Gaga or Stephen Fry, but I'm happy that so many people continue to find it worth visiting! (and here's another photo of Dubrovnik)

Using blogs as a core part of class activity

This was a presentation I gave at Sheffield University's Learning and Teaching conference in January and suddenly realised I hadn't uploaded to Slideshare, so here it is. I describe the use of team blogs as a core part of learning and teaching in a Masters-level module at the Information School, University of Sheffield.

Using blogs as a core part of class activity from Sheila Webber

New articles in Information Research

The latest issue of the open access journal Information Research (18 (4), 2013) includes the following articles:
- Miamaria Saastamoinen, Sanna Kumpulainen, Pertti Vakkari and Kalervo Järvelin: Task complexity affects information use: a questionnaire study in city administration
- Ola Pilerot: A practice theoretical exploration of information sharing and trust in a dispersed community of design scholars
- Mette Skov: Hobby-related information-seeking behaviour of highly dedicated online museum visitors
- Douglas Edward Abrahamson and Jane Goodman-Delahunty: The impact of organizational information culture on information use outcomes in policing: an exploratory study
- Jenny Bronstein: Being private in public: information disclosure behaviour of Israeli bloggers

http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-4/infres184.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sunset, Sheffield, December 2013

CongRegation: blog-your-way-in

An interesting meeting on social media in Cong, County Mayo, Ireland on 30 November 2013, CongRegation. "CongRegation is a one day ‘un-conference’ social media gathering ... This free 'earned entry' event focuses on peer to peer sharing of quality information and social media insights through a ‘huddle’ style collaborative structure." "A Huddle is a small grouping of people with an insight to share - in a naturally social setting. Each huddle will be made up of no more than 10 people clustered around tables in either coffee shops, bars, restaurants and exhibition spaces all within walking distance of each other." In order to attend, you have to do a blog post on one of their key themes and then be willing to talk about it in a Huddle.
To judge from the sponsors, this was organised by people in the internet/PR area, but certainly librarians and information literacy specialists could blog to the themes. Also, more broadly (and as a committed blogger) I think it's a nice format that could be used in other unconferences. Hmmm, it could certainly work in Sheffield .... More info at http://www.congregation.ie/
Thanks to @LAICDGroup for tweeting about this event.
Photo by Sheila Webber: an essential accompaniment to blogging - turkish coffee at Arasta Bazaar, Istanbul, October 2013

Half a million page views ;-)

The blogger page view counter on the home page has just clocked up 500,000 page views for this blog. Now I know that a popular site can get half a million page views in a day, and that just because the page was viewed it doesn't mean it was read (some of the searches that bring people to the blog look like they were meaning to find something different). Still, it is a milestone for the blog and I thought was worth celebrating ;-)

From information obesity to digital dieting

I don't always agree with Tara Brabazon 100% (e.g. if I was as organised an information manager as she advocates I probably never would have followed the thread that led to my encountering her article...) but her writings and talks are always thought-provoking. She recently published:
Brabazon, T. (2012) Time for a digital detox? From information obesity to digital dieting. Fast capitalism, 9(1). http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/9_1/brabazon9_1.html
Other articles in this issue (Fast Capitalism, volume 9 issue 1) include:
- They Blog, Therefore They Think: Composition 2.0 and Blogging toward Democracy, by Lorie Jacobs ("Rather than contributing to the demise of academic reason, in my view, the rise of social media signals a transition to a post-consumerist salon culture of discussion and collaboration in a true public sphere. ... By embracing the potential of social media within academic contexts, specifically first-year composition, we have the opportunity to shape new media and consciously engage students as emerging public intellectuals.")
- In Video Games we Trust: High-Speed Sociality in the 21st Century, by Graham Candy.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Winter branches at dusk, Hellingly, January 2013

Some changes to this blog

I have added a couple of pages (see the tabs above) with a list of my publications, and links to some of my other web-based content (Slideshare, Youtube etc.). I think I should probably also add a bit more about "what is information literacy", so I might put up a page on that in due course.
Also I rather liked the twitter feed widget I used during LILAC, and I have added a feed of tweets that have the hashtag #infolit to the sidebar (see right). This does slow down the loading of the page a little and I'm not sure if I've got the best position for it yet. I haven't focused on my own Twitterfeed, as that mostly tweets posts on this blog!
Comments are, of course, welcome and I may have a user survey when I have tweaked the page a bit more.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Japanese Quince blossom, Sheffield Botanic Gardens, April 2012

My 2000th blog post! I celebrate with Toonway and Xtranormal

This is the 2000th post on this weblog, which started in September 2005. In fact the total for the Information Literacy Weblog is more than this, as it ran in a similar form under different software from April 2003, until the server it was on got hacked into in 2005.

I have celebrated this milestone by using two cloud-based applications I just came across. The first one allows you to create animated cartoon frames easily (Toonway, a French application that is targetting the English-speaking market, although some fragments of French remain).
I am not sure whether this has been used much for information literacy, but the second one, Xtranormal Movie Maker certainly has. There has been a recent discussion on the North American ili information literacy discussion list about videos for explaining Boolean Operators, and one of them was made using Xtranormal. When I played it, loads of other Xtranormal information literacy videos popped up.
The speech is synthesised, and I think this means that anything serious swiftly starts to sound like a parody of itself, but some people have used this to good advantage. Just as examples, these four all deal with evaluating websites: http://youtu.be/dKVL1ehDQB0; http://youtu.be/5No4TOu5v84; http://youtu.be/TVh6dma6vJ0; http://youtu.be/kO3dOD6-UAY.
When you sign up, you start with 300 points and then pay points for using characters and sets: you are bound to run out of points after doing a couple of videos unless you use the same characters and sets all the time. It is easy to do a video quickly (you type in the dialog, and it synthesises it immediately) - it is also very easy to do rather bad videos. Below is my own celebratory effort, in which Bruce asks what Information Literacy is, and Sheila tells him. It is only 40 seconds long.



By the way, the above isn't my main Youtube account (that's http://www.youtube.com/user/sheilawebber)

Library blog awards

Salem Press ask for nominations for awards for library blogs, with nominations closing on 13 May. the categories are:
General: Blogs providing broad discussions of library topics and trends (last year won by Libraries and transliteracy)
Academic: Blogs targeting academic librarians and academic institutions (last year one by No shelf required)
Public: Blogs addressing the challenges and triumphs of public librarianship (last year won by Agnostic, maybe)
School: Blogs covering topics relevant to school libraries and K-12 education (last year won by Bib 2.0)
Local: Institution-specific blogs promoting the interests of a public, academic, or school library (new category)
Commercial: Professional blogs written for profit, generally tied to a trade publication (new category)
Newcomer: Blogs by next-gen librarians who have only recently started blogging (new category)
Quirky: Character-driven blogs covering an array of library topics that defy categorization (last year won by Awful Library Books
The judges are all from North America, I think, but I don't think that the blogs have to be (so feel free to nominate this blog ;-)
The page with more info is: http://salempress.com/Store/blogs/blog_home.htm or just email ptobey@salempress.com with your nomination.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Charlton Park, May 2011

Blogging review

A review of research articles (published up to 2009) about blogging.
Larsson, A. and Hrastinki, S. (2011) "Blogs and blogging: Current trends and future directions." First Monday, 16(3). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3101/2836