Christine Bruce is a leading expert on Information Literacy. She is based at Queensland University of Technology and has published extensively on this topic. Her ideas have informed a lot of the work we’ve done at Newcastle. I am delighted to say that she has offered to visit Newcastle on 2nd April 2007 and run a workshop based around her paper “Six frames for IL”. The workshop will be sponsored by QuILT and will include some other speakers, still to be finalised. It will be of interest to library, academic and staff development staff. Put the date in your diary now!!

Today I was invited to talk to a meeting of the Durham School Librarians about information literacy and my NTF project. Eleven people attended and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting them all. I think we agreed that the info lit challenges faced by school librarians are very similar to those faced by university librarians – issues about whose responsibility it is, needing to have an institutional commitment and especially the issue of time. With such a structured curriculum there was a general feeling that teachers are inclined to spoon feed info to students to get good grades and that changing learning habits gets a low priority. Several members of the group are keen to assist with running my survey in their schools, which is great, as it will give me a much broader based set of data.

LIMES – Library and Information Management Employability (and the website really is lime!)

The LIMES project is working with LIS academics to create teaching materials which can be used in library schools to help people studying to be librarians learn more about information literacy. This is a definite gap in current librarianship courses, so should be very welcome.
I have been invited to a workshop looking to create a Community of Practice amongst LIS academics to share teaching materials. It will be on 23rd Nov in Birmingham.
I wonder whether the CoP might extend to those of us involved in staff training in libraries – there may be things we can use to help with staff development and also contribute to a central resource. If anyone has any comments please let me know and I’ll raise them at the workshop.

http://www.ics.heacademy….NTENT/index.htm