Introduction

Alison Pope and Geoff Walton

Abstract:

What are the challenges facing academics, librarians and information professionals in the second decade of the 21st century and how, if at all, do they differ from those faced in the immediately preceding decade? Will information literacy be perceived as an essential item that cannot be cut, or rather as an expensive luxury commodity? Can HE institutions afford to ignore the need for information literacy? Faced with the rigours of economic recession, can we send students out into the job market with a less than an excellent knowledge of how to find, evaluate and use information? What will be the UK Coalition Government's line on this? In the US, Barack Obama has highlighted the need for educational institutions to contribute to the development of a society which can use and understand the information all around it.As academics, librarians and information professionals we are all aware that tough times are ahead and this chapter highlights a number of issues for debate. Even the most committed of us recognises that if essentials like social security support are under review, what chance might there be for something as ephemeral as information literacy? This is not only an economic question but a question of professional status in the academic arena. In response to this uncertainty and tight budgets, departments make changes: at the stroke of a word-processing key previously well-attended and successful embedded information literacy teaching sessions may be removed or reallocated to other colleagues. Priorities shift and curricula are reviewed. How can we be ready for these tough times? How can we ensure that we continue to provide the kind of added value which our students need on the employability market?

Key words

information literacy

employability

economic recession

curriculum design

political agenda

Welcome to this collection of papers from Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP) which reflects the illustrious history and ongoing endeavours of this seminar series from July 2006 to present (August 2010) (please see Appendix 1). We hope you find these papers as stimulating and enjoyable to read as we did. Much food for thought is included within these covers, some controversy and, of course, many practical tips on the subject of information literacy and related topics. Just to whet your appetite, Keith Puttick gives a scholarly overview of a research-informed teaching project underpinned by precepts of information literacy and run in the context of an undergraduate law module, Nancy Graham surveys the current literature and thinking on re-usable learning objects, Gareth Johnson explains how to make use of an audio visual approach to information literacy and John Crawford and Christine Irving most pertinently look at IL issues in relation to employability. Elsewhere Drew Whitworth examines the idea of information obesity; Ben Scoble looks at the coffee house culture of 17th and 18th century Britain and its uncanny parallels with the social media aspects of the present day Internet; Chris Wakeman examines enquiry based learning including problem-based approaches, webquests, dialectic approaches to delivery and facilitation and their influence on student information literacy; and Katharine Reedy and Kirsty Baker from the Open University (OU) look at how the OU Library has responded to the need for consistent and coherent embedding of information literacy skills in the undergraduate curriculum by developing an Information Literacy Levels Framework. We hope there is something for everyone and that this volume will give you a flavour of what it has been like to take part in the Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice between 2006 and 2010.

Before you go on to digest the material within the chapters themselves, in this short introduction we aim to give a broad overview of SUILCoP itself; the context, its history and a brief outline of the community of practice, i.e. those who attended the seminars. Finally, we issue a 'call to arms' and ask some challenging questions regarding the future of, not just IL, but the profession librarianship itself as we face an uncertain future.

In order to properly understand how this collection of work on the subject of information literacy in HE institutions in the very early 21st century came to be, it is perhaps necessary to give a little background. Very late in 2004 our line manager, David Parkes, Associate Director Information Services, sent out an e-mail exhorting all the library and information professionals within his team to try for one of the new University Learning and Teaching Fellowships. The scheme had recently been re-vamped and the institution was keen to encourage staff members from outside the traditional academic sphere to apply for these two-year honorary positions. Briefly, the Fellowships were designed to identify and celebrate those individuals within Staffordshire University who had demonstrated an excellent contribution to students' teaching and learning. If successful, each Fellow would need to carry out a project that would be of benefit to the university as a whole. We both applied completely independently and were delighted to be chosen after a rigorous selection procedure in which we had to outline the details of the projects we had in mind. It turned out that both our projects were to concentrate on information literacy; Geoff's revolved around analysing the use of VLEs (especially discussion boards) in order to construct a blended information literacy teaching and learning programme, and Alison's focused on attempting to get the university to take a strategic approach to information literacy.

Since the two of us had been appointed from the same university department it transpired that the selection panel had decided that we were to be given an additional task: to put Staffordshire University 'on the map' in our chosen area of research, namely information literacy. No small task and especially within the two-year time frame with a small budget which was also to be used to fund our respective projects. Despite maintaining our independent research projects we began to address this issue. What could we do that would quickly achieve this end result?

It was rapidly decided that hosting a conference at which national, if not international, experts would speak on the topic of information literacy would be the easiest way to do this. If you have read our collection of papers 'Information literacy: recognising the need' (Walton and Pope 2006) you will know that the one-day conference which we hosted in May 2006 certainly managed this. While the warm glow of post-conference euphoria was still upon us we were very susceptible to a suggestion from the Fellowship co-ordinators that maybe we could continue this success via the development of some sort of Community of Practice. In just a couple of meetings involving some scribbles on scraps of paper the idea and framework for Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP) was born.

We would hold three afternoon seminars or workshops each academic year, one each term. Each year would have an overarching information literacy theme and at each session we would host an external expert and also provide the opportunity for speakers from Staffordshire to present. Funding for the seminars would come from our very small Fellowship budget. We hoped to attract interested academics, information professionals and librarians. We could provide light refreshments and travel expenses for external speakers. We advertised the sessions on the web, in the professional press and by contacting people who had attended the 2006 conference and requested to be kept on our mailing list. Very soon we had the first session booked and a series of forthcoming dates identified.

In 2006/7 our theme was 'Collaboration, curriculum and courses', in 2007/8 'Space, strategy and support', in 2008/9 'Development, dialogue and design' and, most recently in 2009/10 'Obesity, overload and opportunity'. The speakers and their topics can be seen in the Appendix to this collection of papers.

The choice of theme was driven by what seemed to us to be topical at the time and also, to be frank, by the speakers we could secure. This collection of papers is a record of the contributions of some of those speakers. Although it is retrospective, the ideas which are discussed here are just as relevant now as they were then and they give us the opportunity to think more widely about where information literacy is now and its potential direction in the immediate and long-term future.

But who were the community of practice?

Of course we cannot name names here but what we will do is give you an overview of those involved.

Some 51 different organisations have been represented at SUILCoP events. In all, 70 per cent of delegates were drawn from HE (new universities, red brick and research universities across the UK), 23 per cent from FE (both local partner colleges and some from as far afield as Scotland) and 6 per cent from other institutions (British Council, NHS and information-related companies). The vast majority of delegates were information professionals, but we are pleased to say that a diverse range of academic staff attended from time to time. In the...