New articles: Project Infolit; Temporary posts; Observing teaching

The latest issue of open-access College & Research Libraries News (vol 86 issue 8) includes the following short articles:
- Alison J. Head. After 17 Years, Project Information Literacy to End: One Final Contribution Will Launch This Month.
- Amanda Pirog and Arielle J. Rodriguez. Contingent Librarianship and Precarity: Two Lived Perspectives.
- Freya Gibbon. Casting a Broader Net: How Librarians Benefit from Observing Classroom Faculty and Other Guest Instructors.
Go to: https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/issue/view/1683/showToc

The photo is the one on the C&RL cover this month.  Student moving books from the first Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library to the second Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library (1972). College Archives, Gustavus Adolphus College. Used under a Creative Commons license.https://archives.gac.edu/digital/collection/p15292coll2/id/136/rec/20

New articles: Data Literacy; the WHY method; IL of first gen students; Librarians as teachers

The latest issue of open-access College and Research Libraries (vol 82 no 5) at https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/issue/view/1602/showToc has the following articles:
- Making Sense of Student Source Selection: Using the WHY Method to Analyze Authority in Student Research Bibliographies by Frank Lambert, Mary Thill, James W. Rosenzweig (WHY= Who wrote each source, How it was edited, and whY it was published)
- Exploring Social Sciences Students’ Perceptions on Information Literacy and the Use of Mobile Technologies in Higher Education by Maria Pinto, Dora Sales, Rosaura Fernández-Pascual, David Caballero-Mariscal
- The Impact of Basic Data Literacy Skills on Work-Related Empowerment: The Alumni Perspective by Marek Deja, Aneta Januszko-Szakiel, Paloma Korycińska, Paulina Deja
- Assessing the Information Literacy Skills of First-Generation College Students by Sarah LeMire, Zhihong Xu, Douglas Hahn, Valerie Balester, Leroy G. Dorsey
- Open but Not for All: A Survey of Open Educational Resource Librarians on Accessibility by Teresa Auch Schultz, Elena Azadbakht
- Using Machine Learning to Predict Chat Difficulty by Jeremy Walker, Jason Coleman 

The previous issue vol 82 no. 4 included
- Epistemology of Teaching Librarians: Examining the Translation of Beliefs to Practice by Mary K. Oberlies, Maoria J. Kirker, Janna Mattson, Jason Byrd
- Preparing the Instructional Librarian: Representation of ACRL Roles and Strengths in MLS Course Descriptions by Sandra J. Valenti, Brady D. Lund
Photo by Sheila Webber: Hydrangea July 2021

Presentations from: Employability and information and digital literacies

Another catchup on presentations from a teachmeet that took place a while ago. The teachmeet Employability and information and digital literacies was run on 16 July 2019, at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. There is a great blog post with information about each presentation and the links to the slides.
- Keynote: Avoiding the skills trap: Reflections on using the UAL Digital Creative Attributes to design teaching and learning (David White, Head of Digital Learning, University for the Arts London (UAL).
- Mapping our Digital and Information Literacy Framework to the new Employability Framework and JISC Learner Profile. Cheryl Coveney, Senior Library Manager (Academic Liaison, STEM, FBL), The Open University (OU).
- Digital Monsters. Mike Alsford, Academic Skills Tutor, University of Greenwich.
- You’ve got a PAL in me: Mentorship and employability in a Peer Assisted Learning programme. Cathryn Peppard, Academic Services Librarian (Health), University of Greenwich.
- Helpful Tools for Employability. Andy Prue, Subject Liaison Librarian, University of Kent.
- Professional resources for practitioners. Ian Badger, Learning & Teaching Librarian, University for the Creative Arts (UCA), Canterbury.
- Commercial Awareness: a cross-department collaboration. Amy C Haworth, Service Development Manager, Learning Services, University of Sheffield.
- Ideas from others: Employability in library teaching and learning. Doug Broadbent-Yale, Academic Librarian Social Science, University of East Anglia (UEA).
- Workshop and world café: employability skills. Rosie Greenslade, Senior Academic Developer at CCCU
Go to https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/library/library-teachmeet-employability-and-information-and-digital-literacies/
Photo by Sheila Webber of Academia Electronica, a Polish educational area in Second Life, March 2021

Public library digital participation programmes – the impact on #employability #infolit

There is a blog post summarising results from a project funded by the CILIP Information Literacy Group (with additional financial support from the Scottish Government): Public library digital participation programmes – the impact on employability. The post is by Lindsay McKrell, Team Leader for Libraries and Archives, Stirling Council, and Angela Short, Digital Inclusion Officer. "Work IT is a flexible programme of digital support for employability offered by libraries in libraries, established in response to increased demand for job-related IT assistance ... It was felt a dedicated Digital Inclusion Officer could offer effective digital support to jobseekers, enhance skills and build confidence in a local library setting. We applied for funding for an action research programme to investigate this and were awarded a bursary from the Information Literacy Group of CILIP funding a Digital Inclusion Officer for 4 months. Scottish Government Digital Participation Unit funding allowed us to extend the research period by a further 10 months and the research programme ran from September 2017 – November 2018. Through partnership working and 1-2-1 support the Officer engaged with a large number of jobseekers, 32 of whom attended four or more times and agreed to participate in the research. Findings showed participants gained new skills and confidence and after attending the percentage using the internet to find information rose from 22% to 54%."
Go to https://infolit.org.uk/ilg-funded-project-public-library-digital-participation-programmes-the-impact-on-employability/ for the blog post and the report is at https://infolit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Work-IT-FINAL-Report-201218.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: West Port Gardens, Edinburgh, March 2019

Recent articles: employability; collaboration; First Year Experience

The latest issue of the open access journal Collaborative Librarianship (Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018) includes:
- Librarians and ESL Instructors as Campus Partners in Collaboration and Alliance Building by Karen Bordonaro
- What we can learn from Wikipedia: Why we should jump on board by Lori Bowen Ayre
- An Exploration of Academic Librarian Positions Dedicated to Serving First Year College Students by Katelyn Angell
Go to https://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol10/iss1/
Additionally, a paper from my university:
- Mawson, M. and Haworth, A.C. (2018). Supporting the employability agenda in university libraries: A case study from the University of Sheffield. Information and Learning Science, 119 (1-2),  101-108. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2017-0027 open access version at http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/128909/
Photo by Sheila Webber: bicycles in the park, Oslo, May 2018

How do undergraduate students experience using information when preparing and participating in a career fair?

An interesting presentation addressing that research question was made at LOEX in May, based on a phenomenographic study of 7 management students who attended a careers fair. It was authored by Ilana Stonebraker, Clarence Maybee and Jessica Chapman of Purdue University and includes implications for informaton literacy.

Charting their path: How Students Experience Using Information in Their Job Search from Ilana Stonebraker

Information literacy in our future careers: videos

The Information literacy in our future careers exhibition is something I've done several years running with a class that is core to three of our masters programmes, the MA Librarianship, MA Information Literacy and MSc Information Management. In the first week of the exercise teams of students start creating a poster to depict how information literacy will be relevant in their future careers, and in the second week they display the posters and explain them to each other.
This year there are 115 students, the majority international (over half the class is from China). They have a variety of career aspirations, particularly the largest cohort, the Information Managers. Careers that were addressed in the posters included headhunting, farming, and human resource management, as well as different kinds of information and library jobs. 30 posters were produced and you can see them all in this Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23396182@N00/sets/72157627880923331/
This is a short video that I made, asking some of the students to explain their posters.

In addition some of the teams give some very interesting accounts on their own team blogs. "Team I" did a video about their favourite poster which is embedded in this blog post (their own poster is one of the ones featured in my video, above): http://i23things.blogspot.com/2011/10/information-literacy-in-our-future.html "Team U" also provide a nice explanation of their poster here: http://ucanbloglikeme.blogspot.com/2011/10/il-poster-by-u-team.html
We ask people to evaluate the posters, and the two most popular posters were those from Team A (pictured at the start of this post) and Team N (pictured right)

Information Literacy as a graduate attribute

There is a PowerPoint from Leslie May and Cathie Jackson on Information Literacy as a graduate attribute. This was part of a seminar on Graduate attributes in curriculum development through personal development planning held in September 2010. They mention some universities that have IL as an attribute, including Sheffield. The other powerpoints from the event are on the website too: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2010/academyevents/08_September_2010_PDP_Workshop
Photo by Sheila Webber: carrots and sweetcorn in the market, October 2010