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A recent post on the blog Alt Ref has gotten me thinking about information literacy in the 2.0 world. In his post, Brian stats that info lit is "very Un-Library 2.0 (the 'proper way vs. your way)". Why is this and how can it be changed?
The IL standards are broadly: Know, Access, Evaluate, Use and Ethics. IL should ideally help the students recognize when they need information, how to get that information, how to use it and do so ethically. The clash comes in the access/retrieval part of the process. Part of the problem is that the resources that we are trying to teach students to use in academic libraries are not library 2.0 oriented themselves. The 2.0 world is very social and database creators and vendors are not following suite with the library 2.0 trends that we see elsewhere (ie. they don't allow tagging, etc). In order to get half decent results, students need to be taught how to use the product. But does this mean that information literacy is un-library 2.0?
Web searching using Google and the like is not necessarily a bad thing. However, we do need to teach students how they can get the most out of the search engines and especially how to evaluate the sites they find. Many students don't look past the first page of returned results. I don't think it's not a bad thing to teach them how to search better. The proper way does not necessarily mean that their way of searching is wrong. Often times, their way of searching leaves them frustrated and in need of help. By teaching them how to search better, or perhaps properly, we are saving them time, frustration, and hopefully they can produce better papers. Furthermore, evaluation skills are incredibly important in the 2.0 world and information literacy is essential in forming this skill.
So how can we reconcile the two (library 2.0 vs. info lit; 'proper' way vs. your way)? Perhaps we can try creating wikis instead of pathfinders, which will help the students identify appropriate resources. Students can add to the wikis and tags can be implemented. We need to let vendors and database creators know that there products are not serving our patrons as well as they possibly could.
These are just some quick thoughts on the topic. I plan to do some more thinking on this. I've got lots of questions, such as: does information literacy need to be 2.0 and if not, is that a bad thing, if so, how can we achieve it? Look for more to come.
Well, I just can't seem to get away from secrecy issues, so much so in fact that I've created it as a new tag. I blame part of this on account of my government publications duties. Here's some more about the National Archives and the CIA (from the Chronicle Of Higher Education, may need a subscription). The archivist, who claims he only found out about the agreement recently, agrees with what I said in my previous post: such an agreement goes against everything they stand for. He has stated that he will not be entering any secret agreements in the future. Update: Here's a link for background info on NARA and MOUs. Be Spacific also has a good posting on the recent couple of secrecy issues at NARA.
Papers from Jack Anderson have been donated to George Washington University. Great, except that the FBI want to look at them first and take out any classified documents. According to CNN, his family has refused to let the FBI look through the papers.
Well, it's that time of year here. I'm getting ready for my annual review. It's a great way to look back at the year, examine what was accomplished and what has yet to happen. I've managed to accomplish quite a bit this year but it's rather overwhelming when I consider the number of things I still want to accomplish.
Not only are there a number of things to actually get done, there's lots to contemplate in the ever changing world of librarianship. Top on my list of considerations:
The state of government information - There are so many issues when it comes to government publications, especially electronic gov pubs. We're creating an e-gov pubs working group to try to get a handle on some of the issues.
Library 2.0 - yes, more library 2.0. I'll definitely keep following this and consider how we can apply it here. Luckily, we've got a couple of experts in this area already.
Information Literacy - this almost goes hand-in-hand with another concern of mine, liaison work. I think it's incredibly important to reach out to both faculty and students in the form of liaison work. This year the library's trying to get more involved with student orientation and I'm playing a role in it. Hopefully our relationship with both students and faculty will become stronger over the next year.
The year ahead holds many challenges and opportunities. Bring it on!
