Just a note to say that if you’re one of those sad few people who is thinking they’d like to get a copy of our book on research support, it will be available on the Facet stand at Umbrella with 30% off – a bargain! I’ll be doing a workshop at Umbrella on saturday about my own project and the Newcastle IL project too, in conjunction with Sophie Brettell.
I’ve spent the last few days at the Information: interactions and impact conference in Aberdeen. Sheila Webber is mentioning a lot of the presentations on her blog and there is also a conference blog. This was a very international conference, bringing together practitioners and academics from a wide range of countries. I felt privileged to have been asked to talk about my own small project and was pleased that it generated a some interest and possible future contacts in my audience. I particularly enjoyed the keynote from Martin Westwell from the Institute for the Future of the Mind, talking about how technology changes the way we think, or more precisely, how what we do with technology changes how we think.
Another thought – an information literate person is aware of all the aspects of IL and chooses to “do it their own way”, so they way often exhibit what appear to be non IL behaviour – we have to be careful not to make assumptions.
Banksia, WA (thanks Darryl)
I have just received my advance copy of the book written by myself, Jo Webb and Pat Gannon-Leary. It’s very exciting to see my name on a real book and a first for me! Now we just have to hope that people find it useful and that you all buy lots of copies! The book cover says “This book will inform and advise all those who work with researchers in libraries, combining practical advice with an exploration of fundamental issues relating to the relationship between research and libraries”. As you can imagine, it’s a riveting read!
There are only a few days left to sign up to the petition on professional librarians in school libraries. The petition says:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory.” and can be found here
It closes on June 14th – the end of this week.
Flowering red ginger (thanks to Darryl in WA)
Sir Learnalot is the title of a small project I’m involved in, together with Ruth Stubbings (Loughborough), Debbi Boden (Imperial), Chris Powis (Northampton) and Marcus Woolley (Luton). We have some funding to repurpose the original Edulib materials into a digital resource. Edulib was an excellent initiative which ran several years ago, aiming to improve teaching skills for library staff. The outcome of Sir Learnalot will be a digital resource which can be used either independently or alongside face to face workshops. Like Lollipop (which is about IL skills for library staff) it will be freely available and customisable for individual library learning situations.
Clematis