At the LILAC conference, I managed to meet up with several people who are keen to develop university library links with schools to promote information literacy development. We snatched a few brief chats over coffee and all agreed this is an area we want to do more work in. We would like to run a one day event designed to bring together university and school librarians, school teachers and university lecturers to discuss ways in which we can develop a community of practice for mutual support. I’d like the event to be an opportunity to hear about existing good practice, as well as facilitate discussion and generate new ideas. We haven’t agreed a venue (though it will probably be Newcastle) or a date yet, but I’m keen to hear from folks who are interested in participating in this venture in any way, so do please email me: moira.bent@ncl.ac.uk

Spring lambs

There were several presentations at LILAC around the theme of how to develop information literacy in secondary schools. As this was the subject of my own NTF research, I tried to attend as many of the sessions as I could. Several were from the public library perspective. Anu Miettinen talked about how Vantaa Public Library in Finlamd has gone on to provide IL education for students’ of Vaskivuori Upper Secondary School. Lisa Thomas and Karen John explained the Porfolios and partnerships programme: a pilot information literacy project for secondary schools. Caerphilly Public Library Service developed a proposal to extend the information skills sessions to 14-16-year-olds in local secondary schools. Both presentations made me reflect on ways in which academic, public and schools libraries could be working more closely together in this area.

Daffodils

As usual, the LILAC conference this year was excellent and I have come back to work brimming over with new ideas, as well as a large amount of envy for what other people are achieving! I’ll be posting a few comments about sessions I attended over the next few days, but thought I’d start with my own. Liz Stockdale, who is a lecturer in Environmental Science here at Newcastle, and I gave a talk about the work Liz has been doing to weave a golden thread of IL through the 3 years of her programme. We have designed a variety of IL interventions and strategies, as well as some techniques for assessing the impact of the interventions on the quality of the students’ work. We ran out of handouts as more people attended than I had expected, so I promised to add a link to our slides from the blog – here they are:

We’ve also written the work up as an article and submitted it to the Journal of Information Literacy – a pre refereed version is available on our institutional repository.

Thanks to Nancy from Birmingham for alerting me to this website. Informed Transitions High School Outreach programme is an initiative of Kent State University Library, USA. The program’s mission is to foster successful student transitions from high school to college by developing information literacy and promoting positive attitudes to academic libraries – exactly what I am interested in doing too!
Nancy and I have been talking for a while about organising some kind of collaborative event for school teachers, school librarians and academic librarians to get together to form a community of practice to develop similar programmes. I hope to start planning this event soon, so if there is anyone reading the blog who would like to get involved, please do get in touch.

Lake Clifton, WA (thanks to Darryl, who won a competition with this photo)

http://www.library.kent.edu/page/10973

I can recommend Mandy Lupton’s recent article : “Evidence, argument and social responsibility: first year students’ experiences of information literacy when researching an essay” Higher Education Research and Development 27(4) Dec 2008 399-414.
It describes a “phenomenographic study of undergraduate experiences” and relates information literacy to the process of creating an essay. Mandy identifies 3 hieerarchical categories – seeking evidence, developing an argument and learning as social responsibility. She concludes that IL incorporates both generic and contextual elements and I think this study is very helpful for those of us involved in developing integrated IL interventions.

Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland

http://www.informaworld.c…13423834~db=all

Pat Gannon-Leary and I are in the process of writing a workshop for library staff on how we can support researchers who are writing for publication. We’re planning to present participants with different perspectives, so we’re gathering data at the moment from researchers at different stages in the research process, from journal editors and from library staff. We are asking each of them “one thing” they would like to know (researchers)/ would recommend (editors)/ would do to help (library staff) in the writing for publication process. Hopefully we shall end up with some useful research data as well as an interesting workshop.
If anyone reads this post and would like to contribute, then I’d be delighted to hear from you.

This annual meeting is run by the SCONUL Access Group for Access reps from all the libraries who participate in the Access scheme. This year it was held at Kingston University and Karen Senior and I were invited to give a talk about our Guidelines on Library Services to International students, which were originally commissioned by the Group. Karen described the background to the report, the research we had done and the reasons why we felt it was timely. I went on to pull out some themes, namely managing expectations, managing resources, information literacy, staff development, publications, communication and strategy. We wanted to demonstrate how the key concepts we had identified in the report link into these themes and to explain in more detail some of the thinking behind these issues. In order to garner feedback from participants on how the Guidelines relate to their own library situations, we asked them to discuss individual themes in break out groups. I’ll be posting the results of the group discussions on the blog as soon as they have been collated.

Outside the Nightingale Centre, Kingston University,showing the new extension to the library – you can see the chairs of the cafe through the window. (photo from Pippa Jones from Leeds)

The slides from our presentation are here:

I have just realised that a short practice report which I wrote for ELiSS (Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences), a new online journal, is available on their website. I’m not sure how long it’s been there! It’s basically just a summary of my NTF project, what I’ve been trying to do, some of the methodology and some preliminary results.
Access to ELiSS is free, you just need to register

Pippin at work…

http://www.eliss.org.uk/C…54/Default.aspx

Great to see that podcasts of some of the presentations from the LILAC conference are now available on the website

Edinburgh Castle again

http://www.lilacconferenc…_programme.html

Phil Sykes, David Clay and I ran a workshop at the SCONUL Conference on the topic of Research Support. Phil had gathered some data from SCONUL Libraries about what they currently provide in the way of research support and his presentation summarised the results of his survey. It’s got some very useful information in it. Mine briefly covered the seven ages of research model which I have mentioned on the blog before (just discovered the last set of slides I uploaded to the blog have been viewed 265 times!) David looked at the future of research support and highlighted some of the issues we need to consider.
Slides from the presentations are here.

To see David’s slides, click this link. You can see his accompanying notes too

Moira’s slides

Phil’s slides