We saw a colony of seals yesterday on the way back from Kaikoura – this one seemed to be waving to us!

I spent the day at the University Library today, where all the staff were extremely welcoming. The pic shows Janette at the Library Help Desk, which is staffed by the subject staff (of whom there are many more than at Newcastle!). The Library has some interesting initiatives – setting up blogs within departments, a great online staff newsletter which allows for comments and questions, a revamp of signage and communications and more! Everyone participated in my research activities and I gathered some fascinating comments in the Wandering Minds exercise.

As expected, New Zealand is amazingly beautiful, even seen through the rain! I am staying with Alison Holmes, who is the Director of Learning at Teaching at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and also a good friend from our days at Northumbria University. I’ll add a pic of the view from her house as soon as I have downloaded it. We have managed to spend some time sightseeing around KaiKoura and Marlborough Sound over the weekend and Alison is also advising me on T&L aspects of my project, which is tremendously helpful.
Tomorrow I shall be spending the day at the university library – as well as meeting the staff and touring the library, I’ll be giving a talk to some of the staff and hopefully getting them to participate in my research.

Well, here I am in Changi airport in Singapore, en route for Christchurch. I had a 12hr flight to get here but as I can sleep anywhere it was quite ok. Now I have 2 hrs to wait for the next plane and have managed to find some free internet access to keep me occupied! The temperature here in Singapore is about 86 degrees, but pleasant in the airport, which has far too many shops and some beautiful orchids.

It’s taken me a while to decide what to take on my trip (not helped by Pippin carefully depositing a dead mouse in my case!) but the case is all packed now and I’m off to the airport shortly. Hopefully my next post will have some good pics of New Zealand to make everyone jealous! Do please email me to let me know if you’re reading the blog.

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