Information Literacy: Partnerships between Faculty

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Information Literacy Partnerships between
Faculty Librarians

• Bill Johnston, Strathclyde b.johnston_at_strath.ac.u
  k
• Sheila Webber, Sheffield
• s.webber_at_sheffield.ac.uk

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Purposes

• Give educational developer/ researcher/lapsed
  librarian perspective
• Draw on a successful partnership
• Share some Information Literacy research findings
  
• Caution against over reliance on traditional
  partnership
• Perhaps indicate some new directions

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Summary of main sections

• Information Literacy
• Partnership
• BJ/SW example
• AHRB findings
• Information Literate University (ILU)
  partnership

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Information Literacy our definition
Information literacy is the adoption of
appropriate information behaviour to identify,
through whatever channel or medium, information
well fitted to information needs, leading to wise
and ethical use of information in
society. (Johnston Webber)
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The information literate person in a changing
information society

• Information economy
• Law
• Changes in media
• Pricing etc

Personal goals, habits, special needs
Technical changes
Information literate person
Local national culture society

• Organisational culture
• Mission Values Norms
• Management style
• Information strategy

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• Information literate Curriculum
• IL as discipline
• Learning, teaching assessment

Information literate research
Information literate university

• Management for information literacy
• strategy
• resourcing
• policy
• infrastructure

Information literate students and graduates
Staff development for information literacy
Our vision the starting point
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Important start because ...

• Universities in flux, redefined for economic
  relevance
• Headline terms knowledge economy, key skills,
  independence, employability etc.
• Combination of increased student numbers, greater
  diversity,technology new pedagogy
• Critiques of managerialism, overt state
  direction of curriculum
• Information Literate Communities - the macro
  context for partnership

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Partnerships

• Language of
• Partnership ...

• Alliance
• Association
• Community
• Contract
• Coterie
• Fellowship
• Fraternity

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Partnerships as ...

• An expression of LIS values and aspirations
• A practical means of achieving aims
• An organisational form - notional/ loose/ tight
• Shared risks benefits
• A potential future state of unity

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Partnership in the LIS tradition about ...

• Collection building
• Exploiting LIS resources, professionalism
• Communication Liaison
• Lecturer Learner support
• Teaching, learning, research - practice quality
• Enhancing the University .

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For example...

• Bibliographic instruction
• User Education
• Information skills
• Online e.projects
• Integrated Information Literacy
• Enhancing the student.

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Forms of Partnerships

• Bureaucratic
• Library Reps.
• Committees
• Reports
• Hierarchies

• Intrapreneurial
• Opportunity spotting
• Problem solving
• Teamworking
• Communities of interest

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Mini - Synthesis

• Point is that partnerships developed in pre-ILU
  context, so a bureaucratisation of traditional
  roles etc. may characterised as partnership
• Librarians lose out on this deal
• ILU might radicalise demand real
  intraprenurial partnerships

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BJ/SW example
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Development of our partnership

• Transferable skills for LIS students
• Infolit. class
• AHRB research communication
• Shared perspective on universities

• Specific association
• Alliance for Course development
• A Contract
• A Fellowship?

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SW's view of partnership

• Real partnership V token partnership
• No obligation for academics to engage in real
  partnership with anyone (inc. other academics)

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• Real
• Trust
• Shared goals, priorities, values
• Interest in getting the best out of the
  partnership to meet the shared goal
• Discussing issues and implications
• Seeing opportunities for developing ideas

• Token
• Suspicion or neutrality
• Pragmatic association to fulfil allotted task
• Dividing up tasks so I do not do more than my
  fair share
• Interaction outside allotted task seen as waste
  of time
• Partnership lasts only as long as the task

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BJs View of partnership

• Personal
• Can take time
• Shared sensibilities
• Complementary contributions

• Organisational
• Joint enterprise
• Very professional
• Intraprenurial

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What this tells us about partnership

• A blend of form individual perspective

Organisational/ Intraprenurial
Personal/ Real
Bureaucratic/ Token
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AHRB findingsA selection
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Project description

• Three-year, 130,000 Arts Humanities Research
  Board - funded project (November 2002- October
  2005)
• To explore UK academics conceptions of, and
  pedagogy for, information literacy

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Key aims

• Investigate academics' educational practice as
  regards information literacy
• Identify whether there are differences in
  conception and practice in different disciplines

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Approach

• Phenomenographic study Interviews and Analysis
  (months 1-21)
• 20 interviews x 4 disciplines (73 so far)
• Hard Pure Chemistry
• Hard Applied Civil Engineering
• Soft Pure English Literature
• Soft Applied Marketing
• Survey of wider practice Questionnaires and
  Analysis (months 22-36)

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Interviews

• Approx. 1 hour each
• 3 basic questions
• What is your conception of IL?
• How do you engage your students in IL?
• Do you assess IL directly or indirectly?
• Do you work with the library?
• What is your conception of the Information
  Literate University?

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What lecturers said about librarians, libraries
ILU

• Impressions, flavours
• our italics

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Prologue

• "Yeah, there is a lot of interaction in the
  English department with the librarians, all
  though the impetus kind of, the impetus always
  seems to come from the librarians rather than us.
  They are always trying to reach out and like
  e-mailing you saying, Weve got these fantastic
  resources that people dont know about and
  collections that students arent using. "
  (Interviewee ENGL13)

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In the past

• "I have worked in old universities, new
  universities, ancient universities, and a
  management college, so I have tried to whole
  gamut, and I have worked with some really awful
  librarians. I actually had a librarian who tried
  to ban my students from the library! Because
  there were too many of them and I had given them
  too much to read and they were cluttering the
  place up! Laughs Seriously!"
• (Marketing 10)

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Now however ...

• "She is very positive and very helpful. She is a
  person who is incredibly easy to work with .."
  (Marketing10)
• "to actually have a librarian who is positive and
  out-going, and supportive and skilled, is just
  for me a really lucky hit. You always hope, but
  its not always what you get. "
• (Marketing10)

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On the other hand ...

• (ENGL17) Well, we liase with the library uh,
  I am not sure how it actually works but, as I say
  when I was the course leader, which was long
  before IT was sort of so common, every year the
  library would sort of offer a kind of preparation
  for students on how to access material for that
  particular year, and so say at the end of the
  second year, they would have specific kind of
  workshops on how to, again, find secondary
  sources for their dissertations. I mean that is
  kind of still taking place. I think this new
  first year course kind of does it all. But it is
  emerging that that kind of work with the library
  would actually benefit the students in their
  second and third year, when they are doing their
  dissertations and independent study.

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and ...

• If there is one complaint about engineers and
  librarians, it is that we dont tell them enough.
  One of the other things that I do is prepare the
  undergraduate reading lists and keep the library
  informed of what books we are using for the
  different modules, but we dont recommend enough
  books and we dont tell them quickly enough what
  our new interests are and help them keeping
  abreast of new books published " (CENG18)

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So ...

• Speaking with the subject librarians, they are
  keen to become more involved with that, bringing
  in more information about how to research things,
  I think they want the students to be more
  conversant with library research techniques.
  (CENG18)
• Were timetabling in a full afternoon this
  October, for students to be conversant with
  researching things, whereas in the past it might
  have been an hour of, Have you registered? This
  is where you borrow books? Now its a full
  afternoon. " (CENG18)

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...If...

• " An information literate university would have a
  fuller interface between library and information
  professionals and all its departments, and at the
  risk of having a wish list, we would have more
  librarians who would have more time to work more
  closely with departments. (ENGL 15)
• Ctd.

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If ctd.

• At the moment what we tend to have, and this is
  absolutely nobodys fault, is a library full of
  librarians and a department full of academics and
  librarians and academics meet for example now and
  again in faculty information policy meetings or
  faculty whatever committee, library committee.
  It would be nicer. It would be good to have a
  world in which librarians came into the
  classrooms more often. (ENGL 15)

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Mini summary

• Partnerships seem to be patchy across people,
  disciplines institutions
• Generally academics think LIS a good thing
  however some quite restricted visions
• ILU perhaps the most promising avenue beyond
  traditional, or even enhanced partnerships

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ILU LIS

• Change forces
• Lifelong learning
• ICT Internet
• Integrated information
• Innovation in pedagogy

• Implications
• Librarians as learning consultants?
• Libraries as catalysts?
• New organisational structures for community?

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ILU as rhetorical community

• An abundance of information, for the potential
  community of learning partners, with a new
  direction - my rubric.
• Some sample sayings from the interviews follow
  under the rubric.
• Italics ours

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Abundance of information ...

• "the aim would be to make every bit of
  information that is possible to have accessible.
  
• "to be able to use information more efficiently
  and accurately, of course.
• "I would be using that stuff more" electronic
  resources
• for students " they would be very efficient and
  effective at managing information, using
  information, so a full knowledge of where to
  access, how to analyse, and then to use."

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for the potential community ...

• "almost like an ideal like an exchange of
  knowledge and experience and skills, um and an
  university that is highly information literate
  would provide access to information and advice to
  a much larger constituency than just students
  one that enables those kinds of enriching process
  of where people interact in many, many unplanned
  and unlooked-for ways

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of learning partners ...

• "you need buildings and communication methods
  that break down barriers and help people to bump
  into one another so that ideas flow.
• "Library facilities are good, search facilities
  are good, lots of subscriptions to journal,
  inter-library loan I think all the technological
  side is there. The challenge would be changing
  the way that academics provide teaching or
  learning provision, or whatever you want to call
  it. "

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with a new direction.

• "I dont know that I would be doing anything
  differently um, it would just be that I would
  have so much more freedom to interact and engage
  with others.
• "I think it was a sort of kind of utopia where
  people knew laughs about internal information
  and links to external information that would
  avoid wasting time "

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Implications of ILU for Librarians

• Questions Discussion

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More information

• Project Website
• http//dis.shef.ac.uk/literacy/project/
• Information Literacy Weblog
• http//ciquest.shef.ac.uk/infolit/
• Information Literacy Place
• http//dis.shef.ac.uk/literacy/
• Johnston, B. and Webber, S. (2003) Information
  literacy in higher education a review and case
  study. Studies in higher education, 28 (3),
  335-352.