LILAC 2024: Reflections

Last week I was at LILAC, the annual conference on information literacy, at Leeds Beckett University. Now that I’m recovering from the exhaustion of a three-day conference, I thought I’d share some thoughts and reflections on my highlights and learning points from the conference.

Navigating LILAC with a knee injury

I’m starting with this before getting into my learning points because honestly, it shaped my whole experience. I had a minor operation on my right knee at the start of March, which I am still recovering from. I thought I’d be more recovered than I was by the time LILAC came around, but it turns out that navigating a conference three weeks after knee surgery is HARD. I missed out on most of the social and networking side – largely because I skipped the two evening events in favour of icing my knee in my hotel room! But also because, with my mobility restricted, I couldn’t really circulate and seek people out during the lunch and coffee breaks the way I usually would. I noticed that despite skipping all the socialising, I was exactly as exhausted at the end of the conference as I would have been after my usual three days of busy networking and late nights! So I’m putting that down to the extra energy I’m expending in just getting around, plus the toll that healing takes on your body.

The other thing I feel is important to mention is pain. I don’t think I’d ever really grasped just how all-encompassing pain is. It is harder to concentrate, to be present and to think and discuss ideas when you are in constant pain. I also have a greater appreciation for accessibility challenges now! Although I’d like to hope I’ve always been reasonably well-attuned to the need for accessibility, knowing about the difficulty of navigating the world in a body that doesn’t quite do what you need it to is very different to actually living that experience.

I would like to say a massive thank you to the LILAC committee for working with me to make my experience at the conference as manageable as possible. As well as to everyone at LILAC who held open doors, patiently waited for me to make my slow and painful way into lecture theatres, and brought me cups of tea!

In Gillian Siddall’s session on photovoice, we were invited to take a photo that represented our experience at LILAC. My attempt is above. I chose to show the three things that were getting me through LILAC: ibuprofen, my walking stick, and tea!

The importance of cake

And not just for the sugary energy boost required for three days of conferencing… Genuinely one of my major takeaways from this year’s LILAC was a metaphor used by Maha Bali, the day 2 keynote speaker. Her talk was absolutely brilliant, one of the best keynotes I think I’ve ever seen. I would strongly recommend reading through Maha’s slides, and there is a recording available of another conference talk she gave recently which she has described as “similar but not identical” to her LILAC keynote.

In Maha’s discussion on teaching critical AI literacy, she mentioned that she uses a baking metaphor to help students understand when it is appropriate to use AI and when not. She used three “levels” of cake-making to make her point: baking from scratch, using a box mix, or buying a ready-made cake. If a good friend has a big birthday celebration, then if you are a keen baker you might want to make them a cake from scratch. On the other hand, if you’ve never baked before then maybe this isn’t the time to experiment, and you’d be better off using a box mix to get the basic cake done, and then decorate it yourself to add a personal touch. Or maybe, if it’s an office party for someone you barely know but everyone has been asked to contribute some food, maybe you just buy a packet of Jaffa Cakes and call it a day.

Just as we accept that socially, all of these approaches are acceptable in different circumstances, so it is with AI. Doing something where the process doesn’t really matter and the output is low-stakes and simple? Use AI. If the process matters a bit and the output has to be more robust? Maybe use AI for the framework and then flesh out the details yourself. Doing something where you are being judged on both the process and the output, and both need to be high standard? Do it from scratch.

I love this metaphor as it’s easily graspable, and applicable in many different scenarios. Alice Cann on Bluesky pointed out that you could also add in points like whether the “ingredients” are important:

BlueSky post from Alice Cann

I also think it could be extended beyond just use of AI, to information literacy more broadly. This came up in a couple of other talks: in his day 3 keynote, Andy Walsh talked about compassionate pedagogy, and helping students to understand when a “least effort” approach can be enough, rather than terrifying them into thinking if they’re not doing a fully Booleaned-up systematic search then they’re doing it wrong. In their excellent panel discussion on social class, Darren Flynn, Rosie Hare. Jennie-Claire Crate, Ramona Naicker and Andrew Preater also discussed helping students who may come in with less experience of academic conventions (e.g. if they are the first in their family to attend university) by helping them to identify the shortcuts that are acceptable to use.

Challenging our assumptions

Speaking of the social class panel, that was probably one of my favourite sessions of the conference. There are some great provocations on the Padlet that was shared before the session, and I believe the panel plans to blog some reflections and responses to the points raised.

One early point was about how important it is to incorporate critical theory into our work in order to support social justice. On the Padlet, several people had commented along the lines that they felt critical theory was too complex, requiring “fancy terminology”, and was irrelevant to students’ needs in an information literacy classroom. The panel pushed back on this, arguing that a) you don’t need to have read all the books on critical theory and be able to quote Marx at the drop of a hat to be able to bring criticality into your practice; and b) suggesting that critical theory is irrelevant to working-class students’ experiences suggests that you don’t think that issues of power structures and systemic injustice are important. The panel suggested that the idea of critical theory being too complex or difficult to address in an IL setting could be an excuse to hide behind! They noted that using critical theory in practice means things like interrogating your own assumptions, promoting critical thinking skills, and questioning what information sources you use/promote. They’re not suggesting librarians need to open IL classes with a lecture on Paolo Freire!

On a practical note, I picked up lots of useful and thought-provoking ideas from this session that I intend to put into practice. One was about using words like “obviously” – I’m sure I say this a lot, it’s one of my verbal tics! But as Ramona pointed out, calling something “obvious” is really othering for people who don’t already know about that thing. That really struck a chord with me, so I’m going to aim to scrub that word from my vocabulary! From the audience, Jess Haigh also noted that in inductions, it is really helpful to directly address the library anxiety that many students have (this won’t be limited to working class students, but may well be more common among this group). She said she will often say explicitly “you may have come from a school or college where the library was somewhere you sent if you were naughty, that doesn’t happen here”! Darren agreed, and said that it’s much better to include helpful pointers like this than the usual quasi-marketing talk about how old the university is and how many books are in the library – students generally don’t care about this information, but if anything it’s likely to be intimidating for those who are new to academic environments.

Elsewhere, another favourite session was Becky Scott’s talk on using narrative inquiry. I LOVED this talk, and would be fascinated to see more of her research! She talked a little about how her research approach involved countering some expectations of what academic research outputs look like, particularly when it comes to publishing. The research outputs being produced are in the form of poetry – Becky read one of the poems she’d written based on one of her interviews, and it was wonderful. I love the idea of using poetry to create a true reflection of what an interviewee has said and what they meant. It got me thinking about what we think research looks like, and how creative research methods can challenge this.

Reading

Finally, another theme that came up a few times was the importance of teaching people how to read. Now given that the audience of this conference is predominantly higher education librarians, we weren’t talking about basic literacy! But more, how to help HE students learn the skills needed to read academic works.

In my wonderful colleague Zoë Johnson’s workshop, we discussed in groups various questions including: do we see a decline in reading at our institutions? How are students taught to read academic texts, and whose responsibility is this? Does format (ebook, audiobook, or standard paper book) matter?

We discussed a number of points including, where does teaching the skills for academic reading fit into the curriculum? University lecturers often bemoan their students not having learned these skills at school or college, but where would teachers fit these in? My own opinion on this is that I think it’s unhelpful to complain about what knowledge students do or don’t have when they arrive at university. Until someone invents a time machine, we have to teach students at the level they arrive with, so what is the best way to do that?

We also discussed the shift to ebook-first models that many university libraries now follow, and how this may have impacted student reading. Although the promise of ebooks was that they offered a flexible and cost-effective approach to collection development, in practice the experience of reading a library ebook is so poor that most students simply don’t use them.

In another session, led by Tasha Cooper and Alison McKay from UWE Bristol, we participated in an academic reading circle (ARC). The idea of an ARC is that in groups, everyone reads the same article, but each person takes a different role and reads through that lens. The roles are flexible, but the three we used in this session were the Visualiser, who creates a visual representation such as a mind-map of the article; the Connector, who follows up links or references in the article, or looks up other information or related concepts; and the Facilitator, who gets the discussion going and thinks of questions to ask.

We each picked our roles, then read a short journal article on media literacy and body image. Then each of the “roles” got together with others of the same role (i.e. all of the Facilitators together, etc.) to discuss what we had picked up on from the article. Then we went back into our groups of three (consisting of one Visualiser, one Connector and one Facilitator) and had group discussions about the article.

I really enjoyed doing this, and can see how it would be really helpful for students in developing their reading skills. I had initially assumed that this was an activity that the presenters used with researchers and/or academics in their institution, but I was mistaken – they actually do this with undergraduates, mostly first years, in health care and social work courses. I love this idea and am thinking about how I could introduce something similar with my own students.

Concluding thoughts

Overall, I have lots to think about from LILAC this year. Although my restricted mobility meant it was quite a different experience than usual, I really got a lot out of it. The programme this year was fantastic, I’ve only mentioned here a couple of standouts, but I learned something useful from every session I attended!

I’m looking forward to LILAC 2025 in Cardiff! Hopefully by then I will a) be able to get around easier (and get back on the dance floor at the conference dinner!) and b) have some early insights to share from my PhD, for which I start data collection in the autumn term of 2024-25.

ECIL 2023: Standout presentations

In the last of my series of blog posts from the European Conference on Information Literacy, I am going to talk about a couple of my favourite presentations from the conference. Of course, all the presentations I’ve discussed are ones that stuck in my head for various reasons! But the ones below are the standouts for me, that didn’t necessarily lead to any practical ideas, but that I just really enjoyed.

Visualising online search processes

This was an absolutely fascinating presentation. It was highly visual and sadly I didn’t think to take any photos, but will do my best to describe it!

Luca Botturi, from the Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, has been part of a team that developed a visualisation technique for analysing search behaviours. The team gave a group of 16-20 year old participants search tasks to conduct in their own time, on their own devices, with browser software installed to track their searches. The search scenarios were all topics that would require exploration, e.g. a friend has heard that basil is carcinogenic, would you advise them to eat pesto or not based on the information you can find? (As an aside, I love how incredibly Italian that search task is…) Some tasks were open (multiple possible answers), some closed (only one correct answer). Alongside recording their search activities through the browser software, students were asked to provide their answer (which was marked and scored for accuracy), and give a rationale of how they came to that answer.

The software recorded what terms had been searched for, how many different searches were conducted, how long the student spent on the results page, what they clicked on, and how many items they clicked on. This resulted in a visual representation of typical patterns of search, making visible what is usually opaque.

Luca shared examples of some of the search pattern visualisations on screen, and I was struck by how easy to “read” they were. They represented lots of complex information, but once you knew what the bars and colours referred to, it was easy to see the difference between, for example, someone who types in lots of variations on a search term but never leaves the results page, relying on the snippets/summaries to inform them; and someone who does one search, clicks on a couple of results and spends a bit of time reading them, then comes back and searches again, having used the first information they find to refine their search. I’m hoping the slides from this presentation will be shared online, and if they are I will come back and update this post with a link.

As well as analysing the search patterns themselves, the team also brought the visual patterns back to the class to share with the students, and used them to help the students reflect on their search practices. Luca noted that people often don’t know what other ways of searching exist as they never see others do it, so this was valuable for broadening students’ understandings of how search could work. Seeing each other’s search techniques enabled them to learn from each other, as well as reflect on how they were searching and why.

One key finding was that among the secondary school students in the sample, the most common search pattern was staying on the search page, using the previews to gain info rather than clicking on the results. This often led to students encountered misleading or decontextualised information. However most still managed to come up with good answers to the questions. The researchers also noted that most of the searches were very fast – the average time spent on one query was just nine seconds to come up with an answer! This surprised the researchers as many of the search scenarios were complex questions, however in most cases the participants were able to answer them adequately even with very little time spent on information gathering.

The main conclusion from the research was that searching is extremely varied and personal, and there is no optimal method for doing so. There was no correlation between patterns of search and scores on the answers. However using a variety of methods for different needs may be beneficial, and users may learn new techniques and develop their own skills by observing others. Seeing that your peers are doing things differently is likely to be more effective than being taught “better” techniques by librarians or teachers.

School libraries project in Kazakhstan

In one of the last sessions I attended at the conference, Yelizaveta Kamilova and Zhuldyz Orazymbetova from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan discussed a project they had been involved in to develop media and information literacy knowledge among school librarians in Kazakhstan. They noted that in Kazakhstan, there is a lack of national policy or materials to do with information literacy, and what is available internationally is usually in English which is not widely spoken among the population (Kazakh and Russian are the most common languages).

This project, carried out with very minimal funding, involved delivering online and in-person training workshops to school librarians across the country, as well as workshops delivered directly to schoolchildren. The team reached more than 800 librarians and 2,500 children through their workshops! They also produced a media and information literacy “manual” to share with librarians, and built a Google site to host this and all the workshop materials online.

I was incredibly impressed with the scope of this project, and the amount they had managed to achieve with so little funding. The authors also noted that although in Kazakhstan librarians are considered administrative staff rather than teaching staff, they took the initiative to apply for a teaching award for the project at their own university – and won! So one consequence of the project has been to raise their profile within their academic institution, and gain recognition for the pedagogic knowledge and skills of librarians more broadly.

ECIL 2023: Things that made me think

Continuing my series of blog posts on my learning points from the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), this post will talk about some of the presentations at the conference that made me Think Big Thoughts.

Recognising the discipline of information literacy

In a panel discussion, Clarence Maybee, Karen Kaufmann, Bill Johnston, and Sheila Webber discussed the implications of recognising information literacy as a distinct academic discipline. The panel are working on a book in the topic, due to publish in 2025.

I live-posted this panel on Mastodon, so my immediate notes from this session can be viewed on my Wakelet. Here, I wanted to highlight some of my thoughts from the panel, having reflected on it for a little longer.

I’d heard some of these ideas discussed before, in a presentation by Karen Kaufmann at LILAC in 2022. The panel format at ECIL was valuable for bringing together varied perspectives on the topic. All four of the panellists come from different academic and practice backgrounds, and have differing perspectives on what they consider important in the disciplinary focus of information literacy.

I particularly agree with a couple of the points that Sheila made (and I’m not just saying that because she’s my PhD supervisor!). Naming IL as our discipline and taking ownership allows us to carve out our space in the crowded research landscape. When I’m talking to academics at my institution about my PhD research, I make a point of referring to information literacy as the discipline I’m working within, because it is a field with its own evidence base and body of knowledge, and it seems to me important to articulate that. I also liked Sheila’s point about acknowledging our own discipline positions us to be able to take advantage of emerging research areas (the concept of “AI literacy” being a particularly pertinent one at the moment!).

What shapes our trust in scientific information

In an incredibly thought-provoking presentation, Armin Jacob and Lennart Perrey, from the ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany, discussed what informs the reader’s opinion of how “scientific” a paper appears to be. They noted that a piece of work can have the characteristics of “scientificness” without actually being accurate, and this is relevant to discussions of mis- and disinformation.

The team conducted a literature search to identify the characteristics of “scientific perception”, and identified the following characteristics:

• Presence of formulae.
• Use of tables, figures and diagrams.
• Language, e.g. complex terminology, passive voice (but this may not always have the same effect, depends on subject matter and audience).
• Formatting (e.g. two-column layout is more scientific than single column!).
• Author names, e.g. titles, institutional affiliations.
• Includes references (but the reader will not check these!).

The authors acknowledged the limitations of this review: the concepts of credibility and trust are very complex, therefore it is hard to measure the effects. Something that appears trustworthy to one person may appear less so to another, based on the same elements.

They closed by noting that these elements are all easily manipulated to intentionally add a veneer of credibility to pseudoscience and/or disinformation. I’ve definitely seen this – I have a colleague at the university who is very interested in a particular conspiracy theory. He has often contacted me to help assess the credibility of papers that adherents of this conspiracy claim as evidence for their assertions, and this kind of “scientific-ish” presentation strikes me as quite common in this field. It’s fascinating to me how much the presentation impacts how we understand the content of a piece of media – the point about a two-column layout being seen as “more scientific” than a single column was a brilliant example of this!

The relationship between videogame literacy and information literacy

Sheila Webber, from the University of Sheffield, drew on her own research and that of some of her Masters students to investigate the IL dimensions within videogame literacy. She noted that much of the research on games and IL looks at using games as a teaching method for IL, but she was interested instead in how IL appears within gaming experience.

She started with a definition of videogame literacy. This has three components:

• Operational literacy: ability to play the game (e.g. navigate the interface, understand the rules).
• Cultural literacy: understanding the game in its technical context, within the world of gaming (e.g. genre), and within the wider cultural world (e.g. Harry Potter).
• Critical literacy: social, economic and political context of the games and players, e.g. censorship, inclusion/representation.

IL is currently not considered as a component of VGL, but Sheila believes it is present in each of the three aspects above, but hidden. E.g.:

• Operational: IL appears in combining information from many sources to make decisions and get better at the game.
• Cultural: IL dimension includes using the conventions of the game, understanding cultural references.
• Critical: IL involved in understanding power structures, how information about the game is created and presented.

This was such an interesting perspective, and one I’d not encountered before. I really like these kinds of explorations of how information literacy can be viewed in non-educational contexts. I suspect many librarians might not consider that a person playing a videogame is engaged in information literacy, but I think Sheila argued very persuasively for how they could be seen to be doing so.

ECIL 2023: Practical ideas

In the second of my series of blog posts on the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), I am going to focus on the practical ideas I took from various presentations at ECIL.

The library helpdesk as a pedagogical tool

Liv Inger Lamoy and Astrid Kilvik, from the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, discussed a research project conducted at their university to analyse use of in-person and virtual reference services provided by the library. This was partly to evaluate the use of their virtual reference service, launched during covid lockdown and now a permanent part of the library’s services.

To evaluate the service, they interviewed users of the virtual service and visitors to the help desk; used “guerrilla” interviews around campus as a method to reach non-users of the service; and analysed statistics regarding the number and types of queries received at both the virtual and physical reference desks.

One thing that surprised me was how little used the virtual helpdesk was compared to the physical desk. From Jan-Apr 2023 there were just 183 queries via the digital service, compared to 84,406 questions received at the physical desk! However, the types of questions received at each location was different. On the virtual service, most questions were about referencing and study advice, whereas the face-to-face helpdesk got mostly questions about loans, collections and access. Another difference was about the surroundings. In interviews, users of the digital service noted that they valued it for being able to ask questions in an unhurried, undisturbed way, contrasting this with the physical help desk where they were often aware of other people queueing so felt they couldn’t spend much time there.

I was interested in this session because like many libraries, my own service has been considering how to balance in-person help with online help services, introduced during covid and now part of our standard practice. I was a little unsure from the presentation if the virtual service was offered on an appointment basis or “on demand” – I got the impression that it was on-demand, as the presenters discussed staffed hours for the service which implied to me that the staff are waiting for calls/chats to come in “live” rather than pre-booked. That’s a route we haven’t gone down in my library: we offer online appointments, but not a drop-in online service (though we still get drop-in face-to-face queries at the helpdesk).

I like the idea of complementing the data collection with interviews to find out more about what users of the service thought of it, and I really like the sound of the “guerrilla interviews” as a way to reach non-users.

Collaboration between librarians and academics following a library reorganisation

Tayo Nagasawa, from Åbo Akademi University in Finland, discussed the implications of a library restructure on developing working relationships with academics in the university. The restructure in 2018 had used an embedded, functional model, meaning that library teaching roles were separated from academic liaison.

The research used semi-structured interviews with librarians to examine the the existence of social networks between librarians and academics, and the nature of information sharing in these networks. They found that following the restructure, librarians who design and deliver library inductions and teaching no longer had direct contact with academics. It had been felt that the library induction and teaching sessions were generic enough to be developed centrally, without input from Schools/departments. However the consequence of this was that information sharing no longer took place between academics and librarians, although an internal tutor training programme organised by the SU provided an opportunity for some indirect sharing between librarians and student tutors.

I found this presentation really telling about the perhaps unanticipated consequences of restructuring a department! I would have liked more discussion about the implications of these findings, and what their next steps might be – I wasn’t clear what the outcome of this research was, e.g. if the institution is revisiting the library structure as a result. But I really liked the idea of a relationship-mapping exercise, to see what networks exist and how information is shared.

Incorporating SIFT into one-shot workshops

As part of a Pecha Kucha session, Rebecca Hastie from the American University of Sharjah, UAE, talked about how she uses the SIFT method for evaluating sources in her one-shot workshops. To use the framework in such a short time, Rebecca introduces all four “moves” but focuses on “Stop” and “Investigate” with an activity. These workshops take place in a computer room, with around 20ish students. After presenting the whole SIFT framework, students are given a shared Google doc with links to articles on various topics. In pairs, students pick one article from the list and work in pairs to SIFT it for 10 minutes, focusing on the first two stages. After the ten minutes, the session closes with a whole-class discussion on one of the links chosen.

I was really interested to see how Rebecca was using SIFT, as it’s a tool I also use in my one-shot classes. I find it a lot more effective than CRAAP, which I think is quite outdated as an evaluation method. I was jealous that she gets to run workshops with such small groups – I would love to do an activity like this, but as my groups are usually 100+, and in a lecture theatre rather than a computer room, it’s not really doable! I am going to try to adapt this activity for some of my smaller classes though – I do have a couple of smallish groups this could potentially work with.

ECIL 2023: The keynotes

Three weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), in beautiful Krakow, Poland. I was there to present some of my PhD literature review as part of the doctoral forum. I will be blogging my reflections on the doctoral forum on my research blog, but here I thought I would share some of my highlights and learning points from the conference.

I have a lot of notes and a lot of thoughts about the conference, so I am going to split this into a few separate posts. In this first post, I will reflect on the four keynote sessions.

This is the first conference I’ve attended since quitting Twitter, which was a challenge for me as I usually use Twitter to live-post the keynotes, as well as connecting with other attendees. I had a go this time at live-“tooting” on Mastodon instead. I’m not totally sure how successful that was! I was the only person posting on the #ECIL2023 hashtag on Mastodon, so I didn’t make any connections with other attendees that way. However, I did check on Twitter a couple of times and there wasn’t much activity on the hashtag there either, so I just don’t think that was a channel many people were making use of.

I still found it useful to live-post as that is my method of note-taking in keynotes! I find it a useful exercise for picking out the key points quickly, so from that perspective I did still think it was helpful to do. If interested, you can see my live posts from the keynotes, as well as one panel discussion, on Wakelet.

As a four-day conference, ECIL had four keynotes – a lot to take in! I was really impressed by both the quality and variety of the keynotes. They all covered different angles, and each gave me different things to think about.

Keynote One: Tim Gorichanaz

Day 1 was opened by Tim Gorichanaz, who spoke about the ethical foundations of information literacy. I was really keen to see Tim speak as I’ve been reading a lot of his work on information experience lately for my PhD! He gave a keynote that was both inspiring and thought-provoking. He talked about the rapid development in information and communication technology, and the effect that this could have on society, both positive and negative. He argued for a sound ethical basis for information literacy, to ensure we are not building on crumbling foundations.

Tim discussed various ethical approaches that have appeared in LIS literature, which mostly come from the philosophical approaches of deontology (duties and rules for the “right” thing to do); or consequentialism (calculating the “rightness” of outcomes, e.g. the trolley problem). He argues that an older ethical approach, virtue ethics, may be more suitable for information ethics. Virtue ethics focuses on doing the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time. Rather than focusing on long-term consequences which are often hidden from view, the focus is on doing the best you are able to do in the situation you find yourself in. Tim set out seven practices for cultivating virtue that we could all embed in our professional practice.

I really loved this discussion: it was just what I needed to set me up for four days of conferencing! I appreciated the reminder to go back to our values and ethical principles as a profession, to better equip us to deal with a changing technological environment.

Keynote Two: Jenna Hartel

Jenna Hartel opened day two with a keynote that was entertaining, eye-opening and thought-provoking. She introduced herself as a tour guide to the “Archipelago of Library and Information Science”: the “islands” of research areas that are visible from the “mainland” of LIS. Some close by and already well-explored, such as the islands of Embodiment and Contemplation; others further away and more challenging to connect back to LIS, such as the islands of Multiple Perspectives, Love, and Psychedelia.

I adored Jenna’s keynote! Although I find it hard to see how psychedelic information could be a research goal for LIS without advocating the use of recreational drugs (although I would love to see the ethics application for that research…), I really appreciate the provocation of thinking about concepts you wouldn’t necessarily expect to connect to LIS research. Jenna has an excellent YouTube channel which is well worth exploring. She shared the below video on the crossroads of information and love during the session as an illustration of some of her ideas.

Keynote Three: Alison Hicks

On day 3, Alison Hicks used her keynote to reflect on the sociocultural turn in LIS research. She noted that this year marks 18 years since the publication of Tuominen, Savolainen & Talja’s landmark paper “Information literacy as a sociotechnical practice”. So as the concept of sociocultural IL reaches adulthood, Alison used citation analysis of this paper to explore how the concept has entered the discourses of IL research, and what gaps remain to be explored.

My notes on the themes Alison identified from her citation analysis are in my Wakelet. I just wanted to pick up on one point that stood out to me: Alison cautioned that while the sociocultural approach has opened up new areas for exploration of information behaviour in context, there is a risk of “itemisation” of IL contexts, as researchers compete to present information literacy practices in ever more niche and specific contexts. She suggested that research needs to move beyond merely documenting the shape of IL experiences in different sociocultural contexts. As my own research is exploring a specific niche of information behaviour (that of female engineering undergraduates), this is a warning I should probably take to heart!

Keynote Four: Sabina Cisek and Monika Krakowska

The final keynote was from Sabina Cisek and Monika Krakowska, both from Jagiellonian University, Krakow (our conference hosts!), on the methodological and interdisciplinary aspects of information experience and information culture. Sabina and Monika made an excellent double act, presenting a very useful outline of the current landscape of information experience research, including how it crosses over related fields. I was glad to learn I’m not the only one who finds the boundaries between information literacy, information practice, information behaviour and information experience to be somewhat fuzzy!

One point Sabina highlighted was that a lot of research in information experience doesn’t draw from or cite key papers in information behaviour. She felt this was a weakness, as there is a robust body of work in information behaviour that could help researchers avoid repetition or reinventing the wheel. I would also add to this that information literacy also has its own, well-established research tradition – I think there is a risk of these competing schools of thought within LIS becoming siloed.

Summary

The four keynotes together worked brilliantly for setting the scene for the conference as a whole. Each keynote separately presented a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the discipline, and the combination of all four keynotes worked really well to provide an overview of current state of information literacy research.

Social media: where to next?

As mentioned in my last post, I am in the process of a messy break-up with Twitter. So, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here about what comes next. If I’m not going to be hanging out on Twitter any more, where will I spend my time online?

I should preface this by saying that I don’t actually think any of the potential alternatives are the “new Twitter”. It could be that a true Twitter replacement has yet to emerge – but I think it’s more likely that a platform exactly like Twitter isn’t really viable any more. So I think it’s more about looking at what alternatives exist, and considering what it is you actually want from a social media platform. For me, that is: a place where I can express my professional identity (as a librarian and a researcher), but not be too professional. Where I can have a laugh with my friends, find new interesting people to chat with and learn from, and also share pictures of and anecdotes about my cat.

Legacy social media

First up: what I am calling the “legacy” platforms. These are old stalwarts that have been around for a while, for good or bad, and that I already have accounts on. For me, this is Facebook and Instagram.

I find Facebook pretty much unusable these days. I don’t actually use it in any active way: I am purely there to maintain contact with a few family members, and for a couple of groups that still use Facebook as their platform. So this is a non-starter for me.

I have an Instagram account, but I haven’t posted there in more than six months. I rarely go there to see what other people have posted either. I probably should reinvestigate this – but even if I do dip my toe back in that water, I don’t think it’s a Twitter replacement for me. Instagram is pretty much wholly a personal network for me, not a professional one. I also don’t like how hard it is to share other people’s posts. One of the things I value most about Twitter is seeing interesting things other people have shared that I wouldn’t have found myself, and adding my own commentary to things I find interesting. That is hard to do on Instagram, so it’s not a feasible substitute for me.

The new platforms

Various new (and not so new…) platforms have emerged recently as potential competitors to Twitter. The three I am most aware of are Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon.

As mentioned in my last post, I did sign up to Threads when it launched. And I immediately HATED it. My main gripe was that there is no way to only see the people you follow – you just have an algorithmically-generated feed, which might show you some of your friends but will mostly show you (as far as I could see) brands, celebrities, and shitty comedy accounts. I understand a “following” feed is now available on Threads, but the fact that the launch was optimised for advertisers and influencers rather than for people just wanting to talk to each other really gives me a bad feeling about the platform (and I’m not alone in that assessment). I haven’t deleted my account yet, but I also haven’t been there since launch day. So I think that, for me, this is probably a dead end.

I’ve fairly recently joined BlueSky (thanks to an invitation from a pal – I do have a couple of invitations to share now if anyone wants one!). I haven’t been there long, and to be honest I haven’t invested much time into exploring it. So far my impressions are: it’s ok? I don’t think there are really enough people there posting regularly to make it worthwhile for me, and I am not finding it easy to find new, interesting people to follow. I will probably stick around there and see if I can figure it out a bit more, e.g. spend more time exploring the “feeds” (custom algorithms that allow you to control what gets shown to you, beyond the people you already follow).

So that leaves Mastodon! Which, for all its flaws, I really, really like. It feels a lot like Twitter used to, back when I first joined it, when it was just a bunch of nerds chatting. Some of my beloved Twitter pals are there, but I’ve also met some super interesting new people. My feed is refreshingly free of spam and hate speech (which should be a low bar, but…). Instead it’s a mix of cute pet pics, cool ideas and fun facts. The main things I feel are missing are the ability to quote posts (one thing I thought Threads got right!), and search beyond just hashtags. I understand there are good reasons for limiting both of these as vectors for harassment, but I really miss being able to add my thoughts to something I am reposting, and I keep forgetting to bookmark posts I wanted to come back to later.

Generally though, the functionality of Mastodon is very good, and has some lovely features (like content warnings! And the ability to edit posts!) that are missing from other platforms. And while I understand that some people are put off by the complexity of first setting up an account, I think the difficulties in selecting an instance and server are overstated, tbh. (If there is interest in this, I might write a “how to use Mastodon” post at some point, although I think there are plenty of posts out there like that already so I am wary of adding to the noise!) So I think Mastodon is likely to be my primary social media for the foreseeable.

Return of the blogosphere?

My final thought on this: is it time to resurrect the blogosphere? I started this blog way back in May 2009, and at the time there was a thriving network of other library and library-adjacent blogs. I used to post here regularly, and comment on other blogs regularly, and you’d get a good conversation going in the comments of various blogs sometimes. Gradually the conversations about the blog posts moved to Twitter, and soon after that the blog posts ground to a halt as well. Writing a blog post takes time and effort, and feels like talking to yourself: it was easier to have a conversation on Twitter and get immediate feedback, than spend time on long-form writing.

But was moving all of our conversations onto a centralised social media platform, at the mercy of capitalists who do not understand the value of talking and will be all too ready to dismantle the platforms and sell them for parts, a mistake? (I realise the irony of posting this on WordPress, another centralised platform!). This is one of the things I value about Mastodon: it is decentralised, which makes it more vulnerable as a platform in some ways, but also less vulnerable to the inevitable enshittification.

I enjoyed this post on Mastodon:

I would love it if the demise of Twitter brought about a resurgence in blogging again! I’ve also noticed recently that there are some reasonable RSS readers available now – something I thought was long dead with the demise of Google Reader (RIP, yes I am still angry about it).

So, where is everyone else heading? Anyone feeling curious about Mastodon and want some advice? If you’ve tried out BlueSky, what do you think of it? And is anyone else dusting off their old blogs and getting back to long-form posting?

Twitter, my toxic eX

Oh Twitter. Why can’t I quit you?

Twitter has long been my social media of choice. I joined way back in the mists of 2009, when I was just a baby librarian. As an elder millennial, I’ve seen plenty of social media sites come and go, but Twitter has been my longest-standing network. I’ve made friends there, as well as professional contacts. I’ve shared my personal challenges, and got support from people I knew in person, people I only knew online, and kind strangers. I’ve had ideas for work projects, and guidance on growing my own vegetables from Twitter. I regularly learn about breaking news by reverse-engineering the jokes about it that I see on Twitter. As much as anything has been, Twitter is my online home.

So to say I am angry about it’s wanton destruction at the hands of an angry manchild who has not been told “no” enough in his life, is an understatement. Twitter, for all its problems, has been a net good in my life, along with countless others. And now it’s dying because the Landlord of Mars has surrounded himself with people who are too scared to tell him his ideas are terrible?

I’ve tried exploring other social networks. I’ve been on Mastodon for a while (come and say hi!), and I like it – but I miss my Twitter pals, not all of whom have made it there! I set up a Threads account when it launched, and immediately hated it: no way to just see the people I’d followed, endless brands and celebrities screaming in my face. So I keep returning to Twitter – because my network is already there, because it’s familiar, and because live-posting from conference hashtags on Mastodon feels intrusive and unwelcome.

I’m aware though that these aren’t great reasons to stay! When the World’s Most Divorced Man is emboldening the worst people on the platform, creating an increasingly toxic and unsafe environment for marginalised communities, shouldn’t we vote with our feet? Twitter is a sinking ship, we don’t have to stay on it as it goes down.

Today, when I checked my phone this morning, I spotted that the comforting, familiar blue bird was gone, replaced by the meaningless (and shoddy-looking) X. I had an almost visceral reaction to this – what has happened to the happy bird that allowed me to talk to my pocket friends?? So I did something I should have done a long time ago: I deleted Twitter from my phone.

Now, I realise this is only a half-measure. I’m not deleting my Twitter account just yet: mainly because I don’t want to lose my username, or all my contacts there! I’m still hoping some of you will follow me to Mastodon 😉. I also look after my workplace’s social media accounts, including Twitter, so will have to stick around for that reason too.

But I pretty much won’t be posting or reading on Twitter any more. I plan to blog more often, so will still auto-share my blog posts to Twitter. And I guess I’ll check every so often for messages and replies. But taking it off my phone pretty much ensures I’ll only check every few days or so, which should work pretty well to help me kick the Twitter habit!

And so, although I am still referring to it as Twitter and probably always will, in one sense I do agree with Phony Stark: Twitter is now (my) X.

LILAC 2023: Reflections and self-care

Two weeks ago, I attended the LILAC conference on information literacy, in Cambridge. I’ve already blogged my reflections on the content of the conference, over on the Information Literacy Group’s blog. Here, as this is my personal blog, I thought I’d share some more personal reflections about my experience of the conference.

LILAC is always the highlight of my professional year! I’ve been fortunate to have attended six times now, and always come away from the conference with a renewed sense of optimism and commitment to the profession. This year was no exception: the programme was incredibly strong, and I was very impressed by the quality of all of the presentations I saw. I also met and chatted to some incredible, inspiring people. There was a real sense that information literacy can and should be a force for positive change, while also grappling with the history of white supremacy and exclusion within the discipline.

However, on a possibly related note, I also found my imposter syndrome hit hard once the conference was over. I saw and spoke to so many talented, ambitious people at LILAC, from new professionals already making waves in the profession, to similar “mid-career” professionals at the same level as me but who were taking on bigger and better challenges and smashing it. Which left me feeling a bit like: what am I contributing here?

I think partly this is my own insecurity speaking, but partly also because I struggle to express myself verbally, especially on the spot. Given time to think about something I can come up with a reasoned and thoughtful response, but in conversation I tend to either draw a blank, or ramble and talk in circles. I think part of the answer to this, for my own personal development, is to commit more time to blogging. Early in my career I used to blog regularly, and this was how I explored ideas and shared my thoughts in a medium that enables me to express myself clearly. But blogging takes a long time, so I’ve let it fall by the wayside in recent years! My plan had been to start blogging more regularly as part of my PhD reflective practice, but so far I haven’t really made time to do this. I think I need to commit to blogging at regular intervals – maybe once a month? Setting “appointments” for myself to spend time blogging might help me manage this.

Another observation from LILAC this year is that I found it significantly more tiring than I used to. Last year I was just about recovering from long covid when I went to LILAC, so I was very conscious of pacing myself, taking breaks, and getting early nights. This year though I figured that as I am now properly recovered, I didn’t need to worry about any of that. So I threw myself into the first day, attended every session, made myself socialise in every break, stayed out late at the networking evening… And crashed on the second day. I really struggled on day 2 of the conference this year (apologies to anyone I blanked during the breaks!), although I managed to bring myself round with a strategic nap before the conference party in the evening! Lesson learned: I still find thinking, talking and socialising incredibly draining, and don’t have the stamina I used to for a three-day conference. Whether this is lingering effects of long covid, or simply because I’m getting older, who knows! But I need to make sure in future that I build in time to recharge, right from the first day, rather than waiting until I’m already worn out.

In the closing conference session, Jess Haigh introduced LILAC stories: an ambitious research project to capture the impact of LILAC as it approaches its 20th year. I do plan to submit my story, but I’m spending some time pondering exactly what that is. Attending LILAC since 2016 has been transformative for me, not just for my practice but also for the friends I’ve made there and relationships I’ve built. I’m going to spend some time over the coming weeks reflecting on how I would describe the impact LILAC has had on me, and aim to submit something to the project at the end of May.

Reading between the lines: Information literacy in engineering education standards

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the annual LILAC conference about some work I’ve done as part of my PhD literature review, comparing the UK accreditation standards for engineering degree courses (the Engineering Council’s Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes, or AHEP) with the SCONUL and ACRL standards/frameworks for information literacy.

The abstract of my talk is on the LILAC conference website, and you can view my slides below.

I found the exercise of examining the AHEP documents for mentions, explicit or implied, of information literacy incredibly illuminating. It was the first time I’d looked at these standards in detail – I would highly recommend other subject librarians do the same, for any subjects you support. I’m planning to use the results of my analysis to start conversations with academics in the department about the implicit expectations on students for their information skills, and how we can better support students to develop these.

See my slides for more detail, but my main takeaway from this exercise is that information literacy is seen within this discipline as something that “just happens”, rather than something that needs explicit support and scaffolded development. Interestingly, after giving this talk I came across this 2016 paper (Bury, 2016) which makes a similar point, finding that academics in STEM fields considered information searching/finding as a “lower order” skill which they did not prioritise, but still lamented students’ lack of skills in this area. I have certainly come across similarly conflicting views among academics!

Another point which came up in the discussion after my talk was, what can we as librarians do about this? AHEP used to include information retrieval as an explicit learning outcome for students on engineering courses, but this wording was removed for the publication of the most recent edition. Is there an opportunity for librarians or information professionals to be involved with any future revisions of AHEP, to ensure that information literacy doesn’t get forgotten about? We know from research into the professional practice of engineers (e.g. Leiss & Ludwig, 2018; Robinson, 2010; Waters et al., 2012) that efficiently seeking, filtering, and evaluating information are key professional competencies. So shouldn’t engineering courses in higher education place higher value on these skills?

One member of the audience mentioned that in the US, the equivalent accreditation standard for business schools has been under revision, and the professional organisation for business librarians is involved with this process. I think that sounds amazing, and I would love to see similar efforts within the UK! Unfortunately I’m not sure how we would go about this, as there isn’t a professional body specifically for engineering/STEM librarians in the UK. There is USTLG, but this is really a networking group rather than a professional body. Perhaps we need to start our own organisation? Or perhaps there is a role for CILIP here?

References

(you know you’re a PhD student when you start to include reference lists in your blog posts…)

Bury, S. (2016). Learning from faculty voices on information literacy. Reference Services Review, 44(3), 237-252. https://doi.org/10.1108/rsr-11-2015-0047

Leiss, C., & Ludwig, P. (2018). Engineering graduates at work: Reality check for information literacy. IATUL Annual Conference Proceedings, 1-10. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/iatul/2018/infolit/3/

Robinson, M. A. (2010). An empirical analysis of engineers’ information behaviors. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(4), 640-658. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21290

Waters, N., Kasuto, E., & McNaughton, F. (2012). Partnership between engineering libraries: identifying information literacy skills for a successful transition from student to professional. Science & Technology Libraries, 31(1), 124-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262x.2012.648104

My experience of starting an LIS PhD

I gave a short talk this week at a CILIP Library & Information Research Group (LIRG) event, on “Routes and experiences of doing an LIS* PhD“. There were several other speakers there, all far more experienced and knowledgeable than me! The aim of my talk was simply to share a little of what my experience has been so far, to hopefully help others who are considering a PhD, or at the start of this journey themselves.

*Note for non-library folks reading: LIS = Library and Information Science.

Before the event I had asked on Twitter and Mastodon if anyone had any particular questions they would like answering in a session like this. I got a surprising amount of responses, including from people who weren’t able to attend and wanted to know if it would be recorded. The event wasn’t recorded, so I said I would post some version of my talk here. So here, more or less, is what I said…

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

I’m Laura, a subject librarian at the University of Huddersfield, and as of April this year, also a part-time PhD student at the University of Sheffield. My research is into the information behaviour of women engineering students. 

I’ve worked in libraries since 2007, starting with a graduate traineeship in a law library, followed by my Masters at City University London in 2008-09. I worked in law libraries for a while, then moved to a role in the charity sector, and then to my current role at the University of Huddersfield in 2014.

So it’s been a fair old gap between my Masters and my PhD! A question that comes up a lot is: why did I want to do this, and why now? It was something I’d been considering for a long time. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who either have or are pursuing PhDs, and in my role at Huddersfield I support PhD students amongst all other levels of study. So having that vantage point first of all gave me research envy: I was forever talking to people doing incredibly interesting research! And secondly, it made me start to think: I could do that…

I’d always imagined that a PhD was something only the cleverest of the clever could do, and certainly wasn’t for mere mortals like me. Talking to others who were going through the process themselves or had recently done so started to demystify it for me. It still seemed very challenging, but no longer felt completely out of my reach, so long as I was able to put the work in.

What I didn’t have at first was a research topic. That changed when I was involved in some UX research at Huddersfield, investigating how computing undergraduates in particular used the library and other support services, and how they went about seeking help at various points in their assignments. And this was fascinating, and started off the spark of an idea that there could be a bigger topic here that might work for a PhD.

I should explain here: my role as a subject librarian at Huddersfield involves me supporting students from the School of Computing & Engineering. As a woman, I’m always extremely conscious that when I teach information literacy to students from this School, frequently I am the only or one of the few women in the room. And in observing the few women students I did see, I got interested in the ways they talked about their research topics, or sought help from me or other librarians. So that sparked an idea: could I look into the information behaviour of minoritised genders in a very masculinised environment such as an engineering classroom? So my research topic was informed both by my own values, my feminism, and also my professional experience as a librarian and what I had observed in that role.

That idea developed gradually, it didn’t pop into my head fully formed! So I had plenty of time while I was considering whether I wanted to apply for a PhD programme to consider my next steps. Being a librarian, obviously my first step was to find out as much as I could! I spent a lot of time on Google and on YouTube, looking up advice on how to draft a proposal and how to choose an advisor. I also talked to lots of people. Particular thanks are due here to Bryony Ramsden, Richie Dockery, Jane Secker and Alison Hicks, who all generously gave their time and invaluable advice. Jane in particular said something that stayed with me: that people who get PhDs aren’t necessarily the cleverest, but they are the most stubborn. I’ve shared that with a few fellow PhD researchers I’ve met and I think most find it as reassuring as I did!

Of all things, the covid lockdown gave me the push to actually get moving with this! Like many people, I suddenly had lots more time and space to think and reflect, and consider what I wanted to be spending my time on. It also helped with the financial side: I knew I would have to self-fund, and the money I saved from not commuting or travelling during lockdown is basically financing my PhD. (Kirsty Wallis also mentioned money saved from commuting as funding for her PhD in her talk at this event, which is rather a damning indictment of public transport in the UK when you think about it…)

I’d read conflicting advice on whether you should draft a full proposal before or after contacting potential supervisors. I decided to do it first, largely to see if the vague ideas I had at this early stage would actually make a coherent research proposal. I ran it by a few people for feedback, some of those mentioned earlier and also Charles Oppenheim, who when I tweeted that I was writing a PhD proposal messaged me to offer to look it over if I wanted an external opinion. I am extremely grateful to Charles for this professional generosity, and for the constructive feedback and encouragement he sent me in response.

In the meantime, I was also looking at where I could apply and who I could approach as potential supervisors. I did some research into library schools around the country with PhD programmes, and looked at their departmental web pages and researcher profiles. From this I drew up a list of people with similar research interests who might be potential supervisors. I ended up contacting two people, at different institutions, for an informal chat about my research ideas and about their PhD programmes. For various reasons I decided on Sheffield, and have ended up with the dream team of Sheila Webber and Pam McKinney as my supervisors.

Not much to say from there: I applied to Sheffield, and was accepted for a place starting October 2021. Unfortunately a spanner in the works arrived in the form of covid: I got ill in June 2021, and developed long covid. By October I was still experiencing severe brain fog as well as various other physically-limiting symptoms, so made the difficult decision to defer my start date to April 2022. Luckily for me, my long covid turned out to be shorter than most, so by spring 2022 I was pretty well recovered and ready to start my PhD that April.

So how has my experience been so far? First of all, I am loving it. It’s one of the most challenging but rewarding things I’ve ever done. But it is certainly challenging, particularly to do part-time alongside working.

I have recently decided to reduce my working hours. Starting in April, I began my PhD journey during the quietest part of the year for an academic library, so was able to spend some work time on PhD work. But I always knew that when the autumn term came around I would have less time to spend on study. So from September, I have dropped to 0.8 FTE, meaning I now work four days a week instead of five.

I’m managing my time so far by being extremely strict around boundaries. I have set days and times when I study, and I stick to those. That means saying no to social and family stuff sometimes, so I’ve talked to all those nearest and dearest to me to help them understand why I’m making the choices that I am. 

I also want to acknowledge my own privilege here: I don’t have caring responsibilities, I have a well-paying, permanent job, I could afford to reduce my hours, and I can choose what time I dedicate to studying without having to work around other people’s needs. I know people who are doing part-time PhDs while also working full time and also raising a young family, for example, and I am full of awe for how they make that work. So I don’t really have any advice for anyone doing the PhD on “hard mode”, so to speak, other than that I think you have to decide what to prioritise and stick to that.

I am fully self-funding, and again I am aware of the financial privilege in that being an option for me. But although my employer isn’t funding me, they are supportive and willing to give me the flexibility to pursue this while working. While I don’t have any official research time from work, my line manager is happy for me to do things like attend online CPD training or research group meetings during work time, so long as they don’t conflict with any specific work requirements.

So that’s my experience so far! I am now seven months into the process, which as I am part-time equates to around three and a half months of full-time progress. What I’ve found most challenging so far is probably understanding research methodologies. Although this was something I covered in my Masters, that was a long time ago, and the practitioner research I’ve been involved in most recently did not have the kind of robust research design that is expected at PhD level! But my supervisors have been great in helping me identify what I need in order to develop, and I am slowly getting there.

My top tips for anyone considering or just starting a PhD would be:

• Take your time, do some research into who is working/publishing in your field and who you could potentially approach for supervision.
• Ask for help! The great thing about librarians is, we love to help. There are lots of librarian-researchers out there who are always generous with their time and advice. Including myself: if anyone is considering applying for a PhD and wants to chat about it, please do give me a shout!
• Spend some time before you start getting a workflow set up. Decide when and where you will work on your PhD, and find out what options are available to you for flexible working, for example.