Today I had a great day. I was delighted to be asked to help Jane Secker, facilitate an information literacy and library teachmeet day at Kingston College in Surrey.
The day was really enjoyable and I got chance to meet some tweeps 
and further education librarians that are passionate about IL.
I’ve decided to put my notes and slides up so that people can have a look at what I said in my talk – apologies though there is a bit of duplication from my ‘Working abroad‘ and ‘Library Routes‘ posts. For the session I considered what IL means to me and for my institution.
What does information literacy mean to me?
Good morning everyone, my name is Lisa and I’m the promotions and outreach officer for Library and Archival Services at Mimas.
Does everyone know what Mimas does?
We’re based at the University of Manchester and funded by JISC to create online services for research and education. Mimas creates services such as my services, Copac and the Archives Hub but also things like Zetoc, Landmap, Jorum and Hairdressing Training and we were also responsible for Intute & the Virtual training suites.
I want to talk to you today about my experiences of info lit and what it means to me.
I started out in libraries volunteering at an FE college, just to see if I liked working in a library. And I did. I liked it a lot. So then I did the usual – graduate traineeship, library school and the whole shebang and I ended up back in Manchester as a first professional at MMU in 2000 I first started being interested in IL when MMU started the Big Blue project in 2001. As a result of the big blue MMU created a specific post for IL which I was then lucky enough to get. I was responsible for creating a generic WebCT tutorial that was customisable. The aim was that I was to teach all of the subject librarians how to make it subject specific. The role also involved a lot IL advocacy with academics as we tried to sell them on the idea of assignment specific, just-in-time and iterative IL training from the library.
The role gave me a passion for teaching IL and also a CLIP teaching certificate. The teaching certificate has been invaluable to my career. As well as giving me the knowledge of how to plan, design and deliver different types of training, it’s also given me a lot of confidence in presenting and facilitating sessions. It’s basically been an overriding theme in my roles and responsibilities over the span of my career.
People
One of the things that I that really enjoy about being involved in infolit is that you get to talk to and teach people. All sorts of people. I love seeing someone get the light bulb moment, which I’m sure is the same for everybody in the room.
A few years ago I worked as a Faculty Liaison Librarian at Dubai Women’s College. DWC was a further education college that was for 16-20 year old Emirati women. One of my major responsibilities was to redesign student orientation and to introduce an information literacy programme. Luckily my boss Garry was an Australian who had worked at QUT and was a big fan of Christine Bruce so I got a lot of support, but it really was a challenge for me. Extremely rewarding, but a challenge none the less.
Teaching IL to women in English when English isn’t their first language means that you have to re-think a lot of your approaches. Particularly when the women you’re teaching are from a completely different culture to your own. The same old examples won’t work, these women haven’t got the same freedoms or experiences as you, so there isn’t the same shared common knowledge. In a country that has a predominantly oral culture, reading is often looked down on by older family members as this takes time away from spending time talking with your family. This also means that anything that is written down, either in a book or on the Internet is treated as the truth.
Plagiarism is rife because in an Islamic culture students see copying work as sharing and helping their friends. Something which is considered to be an extremely good thing within their concepts of Islam. They also seem a lot younger and more naïve than their western counterparts because they are more sheltered and aren’t exposed to information that hasn’t already been censored for their consumption. This meant I had to go right back to basics. I even produced a library vocabulary sheet for them that defined terms such as reference books, dictionaries and the issue desk. I got the older students involved by taking photographs of them using the things I was describing and including them in the sheet so students would also have visual clues to what the words meant. I had to make sure I had their permission and it is sensible not to photograph students who are completely covered. However the students involved really enjoyed being a part of it and loved seeing themselves on the library documentation. Every aspect of what I had come to think of as ‘the rules’ had to be modified in some format.
Training
As I said previously, I’m the promotions and outreach officer for the Archives Hub and Copac and I plan and deliver our user training. I also train masters level archive students in online cataloguing and how to use social media, for networking, current awareness and marketing their archive services. Because of the nature of the services that I work for, the majority of my user training is to post-graduates. It’s also something that I’m finding increasingly challenging in the light of the current economic climate and the more I consider this challenge the more questions arise that I’ve not found the answers for yet.
I work in a small team and I am the only trainer. Fewer and fewer people seem to be coming to our courses as they are usually optional. This means it can end up being quite a poor return on investment, especially if you consider the time taken to design the training, my travel expenses and possible overnight accommodation and then the time where I’m not in the office because I’m training. I do have some very good links with our local universities and London Met. I’ve managed to get a couple of my training courses into the taught part of the Masters English programme at Salford which is obviously ideal and Postgrads at London Met have a great programme of research methods training, which although optional, they really value and I recently taught 20 postgrads how to find primary and secondary source materials using Copac, the Archives Hub and Zetoc, but these are the exceptions not the rule. We’re not sure how to get at researchers, and as there is only myself I simply can’t travel to every university offering them our training and attempting to develop the same level of personal networks that I have in Manchester. I’m just about to review our marketing and communication strategy to try and come up with some hopefully innovative solutions to these issues.
Market research, motivation and marketing
So to this end, Mimas has been working on what we are calling the market penetration project, specifically aimed at finding out why researchers don’t use the services, Archives Hub, Copac and Zetoc. Focus groups and interviews have been done with researchers who haven’t ever used the services. The results are starting to come in and they’re fascinating and for me, have such meaning for IL training and the way that we’ve been doing this at Mimas. The results are showing that those undergrads that were only using Google to find information are now Post grads and their information seeking behaviour hasn’t changed.
This has really underlined, the fact, that as with all IL education that we really need to get to students in their first year, but the issue we have, is that undergraduates rarely have to find information from anywhere other than their own library. I’m really looking forward to the seeing the whole report and believe it will mean not only a change in how we train our users but I think it will radically change how we develop our services in the future.
I’ve also used the terms motivation and marketing here. I believe the two are inextricably linked together. Over the past few years we’ve been seeing libraries and information services moving away from feature led marketing to benefit led marketing, which is crucial in trying to reach students – the age old questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s in it for me?’ are vital in any successful library marketing programme, and, as I’m sure you’ll all agree, in IL training. In my opinion, marketing and IL are extensions of each other. In marketing your services you have to find those hooks which will motivate your students to use your library services. You have to do the same for IL training, and your training shows them how to use those services. I’m sure the first things you include in a training session are the benefits of attending that session.
I’ve come to think that developing a good working relationship with your marketing team (person?) is important so that you can be sure that they consider aspects of IL in everything that they produce and so you always think of those marketing links in your training. I realise that if you work in an FE library that you might not have a designated marketing person for the library. However the college might have someone and it might be useful to chat to them about how they go about marketing the college to prospective students. I’ve found incorporating marketing ideas in my training has really made me focus on the benefits of our services. Last year for example, I did a series of telephone interviews with users of our services. We wanted to know why they used the services and what they would do instead, if they weren’t there. We got some really interesting responses and we were able to use these to show the value that our services add to researchers’ work, but also we managed to get some great quotes. These quotes have been invaluable in showing our value and impact to our stakeholders in marketing our services but they can also show benefits during training. I can say that using Copac will save you time when you are doing your lit. review, but will they really believe me? I feel it means more when it’s coming from a peer or a lecturer and makes it more relevant to them. We anonymised our quotes, simply stating things such as ‘postgraduate law student’, but in future interviews I’m going to ask for permission to use people’s names as I think this helps in making the quote feel real.
Communication
For me, after considering marketing then it’s time to talk about communication. Think about every time you talk with student, whether it be at the enquiry desk, when you’re roving, or answering email enquiries. I believe that what you are doing is marketing and Information Literacy. Having a communication plan as part of your marketing plan allows you to examine all the opportunities that you have to interact with your users. Thinking of them as short moments of marketing and IL may allow you to revamp some of your existing practices and make each interaction more meaningful. Are there any barriers to the communication? Are there things you can say each time? What documentation do you have that can back you up? Are you doing and saying things consistently? Having a strategy that synthesises all of this, will not only help with your workflows, but can also help give your students learning cues if they have a similar experience each time. It could also help new members of library staff as they learn how to answer enquiries and feel more confident about their interactions with users.
LILAC and the IL group
My last slide is a picture of Duncan Chappell, with IL award judges, Gaynor Eyre and Liz Chapman, Duncan was the 2011 IL practitioner of the year. As well as IL being a part of my role at Mimas, I’m also involved in helping to organise LILAC and am the newly appointed training officer for the IL group. As part of the LILAC committee I am responsible for sponsorship, a position I was given because of my experience as an exhibitor for Mimas. (I’m often to be found at a stand pontificating on the joys of Mimas services). This year was my 2nd yr as sponsorship officer and it’s something I’ve really come to enjoy – even when couriers misplace sponsor equipment! Luckily LILAC has some of the nicest, most laid back and low maintenance sponsors on the conference circuit! Being involved in the LILAC conference is hard work but I really enjoy it and always learn tons of new stuff to take back to my role. One of the highlights for me this year was being involved in the pecha kucha sessions – some of them were just fantastic, particularly “Can we do it? Yes we can! Information literacy perceptions among Croatian school librarians” by Sonja A Špiranec and Mihaela Banek Zorica. They described an initiative from academics and school librarians in Croatia in the form of a fairy story… AND they used PREZI! I’m only just starting my new role as IL group training officer so still have a lot to learn. My next task is to sort out the training bit on the IL group website.
So that’s what IL means to me. Does anyone have any questions?
Tags: infolit, information literacy, lasectm, training
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