New year activities

This is the first blog of 2009 and I have delayed writing until I had something to report.   We got our first statistics report earlier this month which showed that the blog had been visited 1,086 times between December 13^th, 2008 and January 12^th 2009. There was a peak of activity about mid December with an understandable tailing off between 22^nd December and 5^th January   with a revival in visits thereafter. This seems like a healthy start and hopefully visits will increase as the blog becomes better known. We should get a clearer picture by the end of February.  Last week I was speaking to Alistair McCleery at the Scottish Centre for the Book at Napier University who is a reader so we are casting our net wide.

Our first meeting of the year, on 8^th January, was at Glasgow Chamber of Commerce with Elaine Rodger, their Training and Workforce Development Manager, who has agreed to distribute a questionnaire on the information needs of small businesses, designed by us, to Chamber members. We are currently focusing on identifying possible content of information literacy training programmes for the workplace and the wider employability agenda. This will help us to plan content effectively and identify the needs of specific stakeholder groups.

Coincidentally I came across newspaper reports at the beginning of the year indicating that the Business School at Robert Gordon University has secured large funding to develop training programmes for small businesses in the Aberdeen area.  I have been in contact with David Gibbons-Wood who is leading on this and we are currently exchanging information. On Friday 9^th January we met further with Skills Development Scotland to plan the symposium on the role of information literacy in career choice, progression and work situations. We have had to revise the date to Friday 27^th March.

On Thursday 15^th January we had a visit from two of our most enthusiastic Project partners, Jenny Foreman and Lesley Thomson of the Scottish Government Library Services. They were active participants in our interview based study of the use of Information in the workplace. The refereed article reporting on the research as a whole should appear in the next issue of Journal of librarianship and information science and we hope it will be widely read as not a great deal has been published in this area. Meanwhile a shorter piece focusing on the use of information in the Scottish Government and how the problems identified in the study, specific to the Scottish Government, are being addressed has recently appeared.  (Crawford, John et al, (2008) Use of information in the Scottish Government, Library & information update, December, pp. 48-49.)  We discussed with them the first draft of their Scottish Government Information Literacy Strategy which was partly inspired by our joint working and made a few suggestions towards the next draft. No doubt we will hear much more about it in due course.

On Monday 26^th January I had a visit from Tanya Wiseman of the International Development Association of Scotland who is working on a three year Project to get teacher educators to think about global citizenship. This involves changing practices of teacher educators including a focus on information literacy.  We share an interest in influencing teacher educators and trainee teachers so we hope we will be able to work together on this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we are trying to raise our internal profile but more of this later.