E-literacy – the wilder side of librarianship

Citation

O'Beirne, R. (2005), "E-literacy – the wilder side of librarianship", Reference Reviews, Vol. 19 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2005.09919gag.001

E-literacy – the wilder side of librarianship

I found the recent international conference on e-literacy, eLit 2005 (see www.elit-conf.org/elit2005/), held at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, to be of great benefit and interest. It had an excellent range of papers, from the use of the internet to aid teaching and learning at Picnic Point High School in Sydney to an e-learning programme in public libraries in Helsinki. This wide international representation, delegates from 15 countries, might be seen as evidence of a growing interest in the programme topics or it might be an indication of Scotland’s reputation for hospitality. Somehow at conferences the so-called keynote speakers seem to leave me cold; either they don’t hit that keynote or they are flat and off the beat. Not so here. Phil Candy, originally from Australia and now based in the UK as Director of National Health Service University, made some astute observations and set the scene well. The most significant points made concerned the ubiquitous Google Scholar and the notion of the digital divide where the world becomes a dichotomy between the information haves and the information have-nots. Listening to the speaker, while at the same time trying to get to grips with the conference welcome pack, I wondered whether there could be such a person as an information want-not.

The attendee list, always the best place to start, indicated two things: many of the participants were from higher education and many were librarians, or, as one delegate later referred to the profession in an open forum discussion, “God’s chosen few”. I wondered what made librarians interested in e-literacy. The answer, it would seem, is that e-literacy is an umbrella term covering some of the territory that librarians would traditionally regard their own. So, were the librarians there to protect their plots, to run the digital invaders off the land? Well, not really.

One of the key issues of this conference was of course information literacy, a sort of sub-discipline of e-literacy concerned in the main with what library literature used to call “user education”. In its renaissance it appears more formal and punchy, encompassing the internet and all things electronic. Information literacy, quite rightly in my opinion, is enjoying prominence within some quarters and is likely to be a hot topic for some time. CILIP, the professional association for librarians in the UK, has recently joined the debate and offered clarity with a definition. Across the pond the American Library Association was one of the first to define and articulate how an information literate person might behave. SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries) has in a similar vein developed a model that sees information literacy supported by seven pillars or competencies (see www.sconul.ac.uk/pubs_stats/pubs/info_support_elearning.pdf). Common to all three is the expectation that the enquirer is able to identify an information need and, using an appropriate retrieval method, to then evaluate and, if needs be, manipulate electronic sources of information.

Certainly on the higher education front with the increased use of e-learning, typically through virtual learning environments (VLEs), the e-literacy requirements of students have increased. With many library management systems still not plugged into VLEs there is often the need for the library to aggressively assert its presence. Additionally, the proliferation of the web, along with search engines, has led to less structured approaches to the retrieval and evaluation of quality information.

Quite naturally the “role” of information literacy falls to the librarian whose obvious response has been to introduce a programme on how to access, use and exploit the library’s electronic resources. Usually this programme is delivered in the first semester, or increasingly it is available online throughout the academic year. One of the most interesting papers delivered at eLit 2005 focused on an area of content essential to any such information literacy programme – plagiarism. Debbi Boden from Imperial College London noted, “[T]he term ‘cyber-plagiarism’ has been born. It is crucial that students are taught how to be discerning about the information they retrieve”. She explained that it was not simply a question of right and wrong or between cheating and being honest; it really hinged on good information management systems and practices.

So information literacy is well established in the domain of the librarian and indeed, for some, it represents a new calling that merges traditional library skills with the challenge of real teaching. It is all very exciting – until, that is, Stanley Wilder, an academic from a US university, enters the debate and upsets the book trolley by challenging the librarians’ assumptions and setting up an interesting debate. In the January 7, 2005 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wilder, writing from his US higher education perspective suggested: “information literacy remains the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship. It mistakes the nature of the Internet threat, and it offers a response at odds with higher education’s traditional mission. Information literacy does nothing to help libraries compete with the Internet, and it should be discarded” (Wilder, 2005). Whether Wilder’s assertion holds water is somewhat irrelevant; the key point is the timely intervention that will now ensure a critical examination of information literacy and its role in libraries.

The information literacy debate is often confined to higher education, but it is highly relevant within the public library sector where it might be more familiar or at least find its position under the digital citizenship heading. Without a doubt it should aim to empower people to make informed decisions about the information they access. Information literacy is a springboard to lifelong learning and can be viewed as an essential core transferable skill, required by all those who seek to be active in an online society.

Ronan O'BeirneInternet Editor, Reference Reviews and Principal Libraries Officer, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, Bradford, UK