Biographies
John Crawford was Library Research Officer at Glasgow Caledonian University where he was the director of the Scottish Information Literacy Project and University Copyright Adviser. However following the latest reorganisation at GCU, John is taking early retirement under the University’s Voluntary Early Retirement scheme (VERS) and left the University on Friday 18th December 2009.
He has every intention of continuing to be active in information literacy. He has been asked to guest edit a special issue of Library Trends, and will be contributing to a couple of planned books. He is also thinking about writing a book about information literacy in non formal educational situations. Recently elected to CILIP Council for the next 3 years he is keen to promote the ‘gospel of information’.
John holds degrees from London, Strathclyde and Glasgow Caledonian universities and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has authored some 80 journal articles, book chapters, conference papers etc. and two books on the evaluation of library and information services. His research interests include evaluation of library and information services and library and information history. He became interested in information literacy in 2002 and it has been his main research focus since then. He served on the Council of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) from 2002 to 2007 and during this time served as chair of its Professional Practice Committee and was a member of its Executive Board. He still serves on the CILIP Disciplinary Committee and is currently chairing a Task and Finish Group on Branch and Group regulations. He is a former chair of the Library and Information History Group and is still a committee member. He has recently completed a stint as an external examiner at Brighton University and as an external adviser on a major research project based there. He serves on the editorial board of two scholarly journals and regularly referees journal submissions to a number of refereed journals.
Christine Irving was the Researcher / Project Officer of the Scottish Information Literacy Project at Glasgow Caledonian University where worked on the development of a National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland). She holds a BA (Hons) in Information Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and an MSc in Lifelong Learning and Development from Glasgow Caledonian University. She has a longstanding interest in information, people’s interaction with information and lifelong learning. She has authored and co-authored several journal articles and conference papers. Previous projects she has been involved in include a Scottish cross sector project on Information Handling Skills where she was one of three authors of online interactive material for lifelong learners / post 16 year olds. As a result of this work, in 2004 she co-authored anInformation Handling Skills national qualification at Intermediate 2 for SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) and the accompanying assessment (NAB). She is a chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and has recently become a LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) committee member. Following the end of the project at Glasgow Caledonian University, Christine intends to continue to be active in information literacy work / projects.