Information Literacy Policies

There seems to be a growing interest in Information literacy policies. In the last couple of months I have received a couple of emails on the subject which I thought the Community of Practice might be interested in. The first is detailed below with the response given. I'll do another posting about the second in tomorrow.

The first was from a Canadian librarian who has become very interested in our work (Scottish Information Literacy Framework), and is advocating for the importance of undertaking similar work in Canada and likely to start in her home province, Saskatchewan. She explains that Canada is a "huge country in which education falls under the jurisdiction of 10 provinces and 3 territories!". 

She went on to say that

"I've read a great number of your publications with interest, but I'm coming up against a question that I just don't feel that I can answer very well. Essentially the question posed is: "Is there evidence that having an IL policy in place actually produces a more information literate citizenry/workforce? Simply noting the presence of IL policies in other countries is not a strong enough justification for building one here."

An interesting question and one which John Crawford responded to.

"You are really asking about evaluation which is a very difficult area. Much evaluation measures activity and not impact (i.e. making a difference to people’s lives). Because of the widespread lack of strategic planning and target setting in IL much of the evaluation of IL activities tales place at the micro rather than the macro level as there are few regional or state plans. For information literacy policy activity you might want to look at a special issue of Library trends which I guest edited. (Library trends, 60 (3, 2011). The best practical source of comparable activity at the moment is the Welsh Information Literacy Project http://librarywales.org/index.php?id=7498  Evaluation of their work has been carried out - Hughes, K. and Warden, M. (2007) An evaluation of the Gateways to Learning project: the contribution of public and academic libraries in Gwent to information literacy, learning, and training. Final report. Caerphilly: Katherine Hughes Associates – but the authors admit that more ‘soft’  (impact) measurement  is needed.  

I have just finished guest editing a special issue of Library and Information Research Vol. 37, No 114 (2013) http://www.lirgjournal.org.uk/lir/ojs/index.php/lir/issue/view/65 which contains an article about the Welsh Information Literacy Project’s third phase which you should find useful and also one on Ireland which suggests setting up a community of practice along Scottish lines.

Part of the problem is obtaining recognition from Government. We did this by presenting a petition to the Scottish Parliament. The problem is that politicians, at the moment,  seem to think in terms of digital participation rather  than information literacy and digital participation tends to be driven by access and infrastructure issues and not usage and training.

There are plenty of text books on evaluation - Brophy.  P (2006) Measuring library performance: principles and techniques. London: Facet. ; Crawford J. (2006) The culture of evaluation in library and information services. Oxford: Chandos ; Markless, S.  and Streatfield, D. (2013) Evaluating the impact of your library. 2^nd ed. London: Facet.

You may be interested to know, however that most of the issues you are interested in are discussed in our forthcoming book. Crawford, J. and Irving, C. (2013) Information literacy and lifelong learning.  Oxford: Chandos.  Chapter 9 is wholly about evaluation and chapter 10 suggests ways forward."