Reading: Information lliteracy: a neglected core competency

This is one of a number of interesting looking articles in the latest Educause Quarterly. It's a summary of what information literacy is and concludes a number of key findings:

1) That college students information literacy skills are underdeveloped.
2) Information literacy is essential for lifelong learning.
3) Students should be exposed to information literacy throughout education.
4) Collaboration by faculty, librarians, technology professionals can develop information literacy.

It's interesting that collaboration between these groups is highlighted rather than it being seen as the domain as a single group.

The article goes on to explain the deficiencies in college student's information literacy skills. The key findings (course readings and google are prime sources, reliance on professors for information rather than independent learning, google and wikipedia prevalent, and perhaps most worryingly, little interaction with libraries and librarians) will seem familiar to anyone working with first year undergraduates. The article points out that by "satisficing" (finding just enough information to complete the assignment) they are missing out on learning opportunities.

As well as defining "information literacy" as:

"...the umbrella term for emerging literacies such as technology literacy, media literacy, and health literacy." (Weiner 2010)

It also highlights Digital Media Literacy as "a critical challenge in education in the next five years" citing the 2010 Horizon Report from Educause as an important document in this field.

The paper then extols the virtue of introducing Information Literacy at elementary level - citing reports from employers that new employee skills are not good enough (although this finding is not referenced).

I think one of the important questions that this paper asks is how we can develop progressive development of information literacy throughout  education - making the links between educational establishments may be the difficulty.

Useful and brief summary with some useful references to follow up.

References

New Media Consortium, 2010. 2010 Horizon Report. Texas: New Media Consortium. Available: http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/ [Accessed 11 March 2010].

Weiner, S., 2010. Information literacy: a neglected core competency. Educause quarterly, 33 (1). Available from: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/InformationLiteracyANeglectedC/199382 Accessed [11 March 2010].

Ambient Findability : What we find changes who we become (book review)

This is a cross-posting of my review on librarything...

This is the book that has most influenced my thinking about my profession. Probably ever. I've sort of been coming to see books as boundary objects - as objects that connect people or concepts (like on this site) - for a while now and think that libraries need to make much more of the social networking power of books. This book gave me some vocabulary for these concepts but (although it's written by a librarian and I read it as a librarian) this is much more than a library book. It basically explains a number of concepts that are all converging to create a situation where objects (like books), people, anything, will be ambiently findable. The findability will be built in. A number of concepts are explained. Ubiquitous computing (the techie side of things); the long-tail (the economic forces that will drive these developments); spimes (objects that have precise history, that can be precisely tracked in time and space); and boundary objects (objects that sit on the boundary between two concepts). I'll be following up on some of the books referenced in this later to try and get a better understanding but I think this is the one that really pulls everything together. The author has a really good view of where these concepts are coming together and what the implications are. Brilliant.

How To Use Web 2.0 In Your Library (book review)

This is a cross-posting from my review on librarything...

This one was ok but not really what I was expecting. The book's starts off with a definition of Web 2.0 (including the ubiquitous Tim O'Reilly definition) and then goes on to introduce different forms of social software. Each chapter is well furnished with links and examples and the book's well laid out but somehow it didn't quite hit the spot for me. I think I would have preferred less in the way of links and examples and more along the lines of how, conceptually you can use these tools in the library. Maybe more assessment of potential benefits to users etc. There was also very little mention of the ethics of librarianship - something that I think is really important if libraries are going to enter this space. I guess I didn't really take any idea on what web 2.0 is from this book - that it's alot more than just blogging or uploading photos. The concept of extreme trust was mentioned in the first chapter but aside from that there was very little focus on the social phenomena that define web 2.0. Ok for sparking ideas but think carefully about implementing the ideas. Is Web 2.0 consistent with your libraries data protection policies and your duty of care to your users? That's not to say don't do Web 2.0 - it's great - just think about the issues involved as well as the techie side.

Journals to do list

After a bit of reading of the system manual it's starting to become clear what needs to be done.

First job is to reset the system. The report at the moment says that we have 96 journal issues that haven't been received (it also doesn't look like any of my predecessors used the claims reporting claims report has hardly ever been reset). What I have to do is to check that we have indeed claimed these 96 issues and then send the report to print (or trick it into thinking it's printed - I don't actually want reams of paper!). Sending the report to print clears it so that - next week when I come and look again there will only be issues that should have been received in this week.

Second job is to claim any issues that haven't been received and mark any really old ones as not received on the system - this will give us a clean slate, there's no way I'll have time to claim for much retrospectively but hopefully once the process is in place I should stay on top of them.

Third job is to get the predictions working right and set/ tweak the claims parameters - this'll take a couple of weeks to a month and alot more reading of the manual!

Clear as mud...

Well, just checked the suppliers site to see if they provide details of their claims policies. The result: Nada. From experience though, most of the suppliers do not guarantee to provide back issues if the publication date is more than 90 days ago. I think I should therefore get 3 claims in before the 90 days is up so from the point of view of claims parameters I'm looking at 2 weeks past due date for the first claim, 6 weeks for the second claim, and 10 weeks for the 3rd claim... I can tweak that later if it doesn't work.

On the plus side, the supplier's site mentions that they provide Tables of Contents - I can't see any sign of this on my account so I've emailed them to activate this part of my account (not the first time functionality has been missing!). Tables of Contents could be really useful when I get to the point where I'm feeding current awareness to the library webpage...

First, to find out what I need to know...

Just having a look at my journals objective - I've pulled the manual for the LMS and it looks like a number of decisions need to be made. The main thing is to decide at what point to transfer claims from our system to our suppliers system. It is possible to set our system up to email the suppliers when items are a certain amount overdue BUT (and this is a very big but) my gut feeling is that the publication schedules for our journals are nowhere near constant enough to fully automate the process - I can see that somewhere down the line we'd be claiming for journals that haven't even been published.

A certain level of human (i.e. ME!) intervention will be needed. This is dull work but I will have to set aside regular time every week to do it if I'm going to get the journal collection anywhere near where I want it to be...

So what do I need to know?

Well I know that our system can produce reports of overdue copies once a week but I need to know how to do this and what parameters to set for the reports. This will need me to find out a bit about our suppliers claims policies - when do they act on a claim? - how long to leave it before claiming - when should I claim by?

I'll also need to review the prediction set on the system (these are set for most titles but my feeling is they are probably innacurate and will lead to spurious claims...).

So, there's a couple of sources I need to check-out - first is to read up on our journal supplier's policies. Second is to work out how to mesh our system into those policies to form a claiming procedure that works....

journals

Had to find a more manly picture after that last post but I do hate forms.

Here's a more detailed plan about what I want to do with my journals collection next year and the development I'll need to undergo to do it.

i) First bit is to work out how the journals module of my library management system works. I know that it can produce overdue reports for claims and the suppliers now have a good front end for entering claims - I need to get the supply alot more consistent, and put in business controls. Sources for this develpment are possibly my professional network (an extremely overworked sys admin) but more likely it'll be a case of hitting the manuals. Can't really afford training.

ii) I need to do a review of journal usage at the start of the year. This is essential as it will drive decisions about what to do with the hardcopy collection. Basically the question is do we give up on providing more scholarly content and focus on the more browsable content? The development need here is really finding an accurate method of journal survey. I would like to use rfid tags and compare it to traditional methods but I'll need to do some research into methods.

iii) Third objective is to improve access by publishing tables of contents. The new books blog has shown that blogging is an ideal medium for current awareness but the development need is about researching rss and web development to determine what can be done. The idea is to feed up headlines/ summaries that link to requests for photocopies.