This year’s LILAC, held at Cardiff, was yet another administrative triumph for the organising committee with all the components of a successful international conference present including two superb evening events. I shall certainly be going back to Caerphilly Castle again. With the 5th year completed a pattern is now established with the continuing predominance of HE, both in attendees and presentations. This is not surprising, given that HE is the library sector where there is most interest and activity in R&D and also funding to support it. There is interest, but less time, money and resources generally in schools but there were presentations about or relating to schools which is a welcome development. It is also good to see university libraries working with schools and this is clearly well established in a number of cities now as the discussion following Michelle Schneider’s presentation showed. There was a much less about the workplace and taking the IL message to supportive non ‘library’ client groups. There was nothing directly on media literacy and only one presentation on health literacy which attracted a disappointingly small audience for such an important subject. The range of sources people use to find information about weight issues was interesting as ‘librarianly’ type sources cam about two thirds way down the list. In view of our work I find this unsurprising and no doubt Christopher Walker would be of the same opinion, given that he has found that parents of young children’s principal source of information is the TV programme, 'Supernanny'.
There is no doubt that the programme was extremely full, perhaps too full, although this may be unavoidable as the organisers would not want to disappoint any applicants unnecessarily. However the conference has been running for five years now and perhaps it is time to stand back and take stock. As director of the Scottish Information Literacy Project I have tried to move away from a concentration on models based on traditional information sources and to some extent to move away from a culture of librarians talking to librarians in favour of making partnerships and contacts with supportive organisations outside the library world. This includes employers’ organisations, skills bodies and trade unions. In a real sense we should be talking to anyone but librarians and promoting IL as an essential career choice and management skill, a CPD skill, a workplace decision making and lifelong skill, a civil right and a skill to support leisure. Perhaps next year there should be some longer reflective sessions about what IL is really for and where it ought to go in the 21st century. Speakers from outside the profession would be a good idea although such people are still not very common. As usual it is easier to pose the questions than produce the answers.
Christine has reported on a number of specific sessions and like her I found Leslie Burger’s presentation inspiring because she is a public librarian with a cross sectoral, skills perspective which is just what we need.
Among the parallel sessions the one I will remember most is not a worthily scholarly presentation but Alison Beswick and Claire Taylor, two students at Sheffield University who spoke about ‘The reality of information literacy: Does Joe Student actually understand what’s going on’. Although I have sat through many presentations about what students need and what they should get this is the first time I have ever seen actual students giving their perspective on what IL is. It was a naïve piece of work in the very best sense of the word, consisting largely of a video of interviews with students, apparently selected at random, and asking them informally for their perspective on IL. Having in the past been involved in service evaluation work I am always struck how muted the voice of the learner/user is in information skills teaching and learning and more presentations along these lines would be welcome, especially supported by unequivocal evidence of value and impact. A theme for next year, perhaps? I also found Wendy Beautyman’s talk on children’s’ information seeking behaviour interesting. She is obviously very good with children and there should be interesting results but we will have to wait for another day to hear them.
As usual I missed some presentations which looked interesting such as Marsha Miller and Susan Frey on the techno senior.
Cutting the 5th anniversary cake
Monday, April 27, 2009 at 12:04PM