The LIMES project is aiming to produce resources to support learning and teaching for students of library and information management courses. Yesterday, I was invited to a meeting in Birmingham to discuss the formation of a Community of Practice around information literacy. Participants included academic and library staff. The aim (I think) was to foster better communications so that students graduate with the skills they need for their first professional library post. We tried to identify gaps in the current system which we could work togther to fill.
There was a feeling amongst the practitioners present that students need to understand more about teaching and learning so that are able to participate effectively in information literacy programmes as well as enquiry work when they first start working in libraries (exactly the kind of topics which EduLib covered 10 years ago in trying to fill the same gap!). However the academic staff still didn’t feel this was appropriate as part of their current courses.
However, we did agree that a register of both academic and library staff who were prepared to run a variety of “training” sessions across the divide would be useful, as well as a database of people willing to share their teaching materials.
I also plan to follow up on the material which Debbie Boden provides for the library staff at Imperial, as this may be helpful for our staff development at Newcastle.
Yellow eyed penguin near Dunedin, NZ