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Librarians as researchers
Approaches to time
Last Friday, Emma and I trekked to York St John University, one of my favourite places not least because some good friends happen to work there! I’m also a big fan of the wonderful historic city centre and some of the lovely shops!
We were invited to present at a CILIP Academic and Research Libraries group event organised by the Yorkshire and Humberside branch entitled Librarians as Researchers. Emma has posted a summary of our talk on thew New Curriculum blog entitled And now for something different. Our presentation is on Slideshare. It was actually a lot of fun putting together a talk about how to do research as part of your day job. We made it interactive and I hope people found it inspiring and useful. Doing research as part of your day job is hard work, but I think it is also so rewarding and keeps things interesting. I hope our eight tips are useful for other wannabe researchers. And not that Emma and I want to stop talking about ANCIL, because we don’t but it’s equally important to talk about how and why you do something, not just what you found out! However, speaking about findings, the key recommendations from my ANCIL report at LSE are now on our ANCIL at LSE website and I hope our report will be in LSE Research Online by the end of the week.
Getting the whole picture
Tomorrow I am off to Tampere in Finland to the IFLA satellite meeting on information literacy, aptly named ‘The road to information literacy‘. For me it feels like a journey from where I started at LSE in the User Education team in the Library to where I am now in the Centre for Learning Technology. And the journey continues as my department looks set to become integrated within the larger Information Management Technology department at LSE. Working in a very small team has many advantages as you have to build good links with those around you in your institution. I thought things were well coordinated and joined up but the survey of information literacy using the broad ANCIL framework, suggests there is still much work to do, particularly at undergraduate level. For me this is largely because something so important as information literacy can’t be the responsibility of just one department or service, so collaboration is really essential.
Katy, Maria and I are running a workshop on Friday where we hope to start people off on their road to information literacy, or if they are well on their way already, perhaps provide some additional directions or maps to guide their journey. If you are attending the conference do come along to our workshop on Friday afternoon where we will share some findings to date and give an overview about how to use ANCIL as an audit tool. If you are not attending I have made the slides available on Slideshare.
Joining up student support
I’m busy analysing the data we’ve collected during the ANCIL LSE project. Maria Bell, Katy Wrathall and I will be presenting a workshop at the IFLA information literacy Satellite meeting in 2 weeks time in Tampere, Finland. As well as being really excited about my first trip to Finland, I’m looking forward to sharing some of the findings from our survey at LSE and we are running a workshop so people get to try out using some of our resources.
At LSE we have interviewed and surveyed academics, other service providers, librarians and the course team for our core undergraduate course, LSE100. We weren’t really sure what we would find out or whether this would be an effective way of engaging people with information literacy, but what we hoped was we might be able to improve support for our undergraduates and maybe join up provision a little better. Already we are finding lots of interest and possible opportunities to work together and today had a really useful discussion with the Teaching and Learning Centre about running some joint workshops for students. Similarly we have talked to Careers about doing some sessions on finding information for jobs, getting access to resources as an alumni and managing your digital footprint. We also talked about developing and coordinating our online support and yesterday came up with the idea of a programme of seminars for third year students to help them make the transition into the workplace and become lifelong learners.
Our work won’t be finished completely for IFLA but we certainly have plenty to report. I’ll also make sure we share our slides next week before heading to Finland.
To Ireland I go….
Tomorrow I am heading to Dublin, to present at the CONUL Seminar on Information Literacy at Trinity College Dublin on Thursday morning. I’ve been invited to give the opening paper on the New Curriculum for Information Literacy. I’ll post my slides online when I get back. I’m looking forward to catching up with some LILAC friends, and also visiting Dublin which I haven’t been to for around five years. It’s only a shame Emma can’t join me, but we will be back doing a double act at the end of the month at the UC&R conference in Newcastle.
Sharing ANCIL as an open educational resource
I’ve finally deposited ANCIL: the full curriculum and supporting documents into Jorum, the UK’s national repository for learning objects and it is licensed under Creative Commons. Emma and I had the curriculum on the New Curriculum blog since last July, but I really felt that by depositing it in Jorum, then it might be picked up by different teachers outside the library world.
I’m also getting very excited and open educational resources again and seeing them as coming under the information literacy umbrella and an area where librarians play an important role. Sharing, presenting and communicating information is something teachers and learners all need to understand, so to me OERs fit neatly into a session for either students or staff around finding resources. I’ve certainly been talking about Creative Commons licences more and more frequently in my teaching. Either as a place for teachers and students to find images, or more broadly as a way of licensing their own content if they are happy to share it. Last week at the LSE Teaching Day conference I was presenting a poster with Natalia Madjarevic our Repository Manager at LSE to promote LSE Learning Resources online. We are getting quite a collection of resources now, but it was our first real promotion of the collection.
I also had a great conference call this morning with Nancy Graham from University of Birmingham and Irmgarda Kasinskaite-Buddeberg from UNESCO. Nancy and I are thrilled to be attending the UNESCO OER World Congress from 20-22nd June this year. We are presenting a session about sharing information literacy resources as OERs. We had over 100 responses to the survey we put out in April 2012 and hope to organise a workshop to discuss how we can better share IL resources, but also build a global network.
The ANCIL audit is also continuing at LSE, if somewhat slowly as exams are taking place. But we’ve got responses from all our academic support librarians now and are slowly getting survey responses back from a variety of staff at LSE. More soon!
