Developing Research Excellence and Methods

Received my copy of Library Trends Information literacy beyond the academy. Part 1: Towards policy formulation. Vol. 60 (2) Fall 2011

It is an American academic journal, in print it looks more like a book than a journal. It was meant to be published in the autumn (that's the Fall for Americans) but the editing took longer then the printer was busy. Anyway it is now published  and for those with appropriate authorization the electronic copy is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/

John Crawford was behind the idea and it has taken nearly two years to come to publication but it is worth the wait. As he says in a recent announcement

Of the three main areas of information literacy: policy development, process analysis and product development ( the production of learning and teaching materials) it is the last of these three which has  received most attention and usually in an educational context, and frequently higher education. The publication of two special issues of Library trends, the American academic journal,  seeks to address this issue, both being on the general theme of information literacy beyond the academy.  Part 1: Towards policy formulation. Vol. 60 (2) Fall 2011 is now appearing. The articles review information literacy policy making at both international and national levels and includes a thoughtful analysis of workplace information literacy issues. The authors include internationally known authorities including, Woody Horton, Annemaree Lloyd and Sharon Weiner.

My article appears alongside these authors, it is titled National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland): Pioneering Work to Influence Policy Making or Tinkering at the Edges?  It is a descriptive / reflexive piece looking back at the work I and John Crawford did. It is also a record of our work and hopefully will inspire others to have believe in themselves (self efficacy - an area of interest of mine) and what they are doing.

It was a learning experience to write for an American publication. The review process, copy editing etc were rigorous but whilst at times it seemed frustrating I think it has stretched me as a writer.

There is a second issue which John hopes will appear towards Easter time and will be on the theme of Organisational issues, theoretical perspectives and practical initiatives.  Both issues are guest edited by Dr John Crawford, former
director of the Scottish Information Literacy Project.

Over the last few weeks I have been busy interviewing the workshop leaders about their planned sessions for the next DREaM workshop on 30th January.  Once again, the sessions sound like they are going to be extremely interesting, so I am certainly looking forward to the workshop.

So far we have published my interview with Nick Moore, who will be speaking about research and policy, and my interview with Mike Thelwall, who will be speaking about webometrics.  Both have given a quick taster of what they hope to cover, and have provided details of further resources to help participants to read up before the workshop.  I am just putting the finishing touches to my interviews with Peter Beresford and Thomas Haigh, which will be published later next week.

We're planning to use similar tools to amplify the workshop as we did in Edinburgh all the way back in October.  There will be tweeting on the #lis_dream3 hash tag, a CoverItLive discussion space, and all the slides and workshop materials will be available on Slideshare.  Anyone following along online will also be able to take part in the workshop game this time around, so I am looking forward to facilitating that.  If you are interested in taking part, and can be online any time between 11:30 and 15:00 on Monday 30th January, drop a tweet to @LIS_DREaM or leave a comment on this post so I can send you the link to join in.

My final bit of preparation this week is more of a practical one.  As many of you will know, Twapperkeeper - the tweet archiving service - closed down at the beginning of the month, so I am now looking for new ways to capture the online discussion around the workshop and visualise it so we can show how useful it has been.  I am going to be playing with Martin Hawksey's tips, which make use of Google Spreadsheets.  If anyone is interested in archiving and studying hash tag tweets, or has any other tips I could try out, I'd be really interested to hear from you.

Last June I attend an information literacy workshop at Wolfson College Cambridge. I was invited by Dr. Jane Secker and Dr. Emma Coonan of the Arcadia Project at Cambridge University Library. The workshop was for a group of experts to discuss and share their expertise in order to inform the Arcadia Project's development of a new curriculum for information literacy at Cambridge University.

The workshop was very productive and it's great to see the projects output. They have published (2011) a report entitled – A New Information Literacy Curriculum for Higher Education. Now their is a website and a video presentation which  provides  an overview of the mission and rationale for developing this curriculum.

http://infolit.org/archives/4787/a-new-information-literacy-curriculum-for-higher-ed/

It's great to see research and development work being used.