Information literacy #irelibchat summary - Weds 26th Sept

A big thank you to all those who took part in Wednesday's #irelibchat on Information Literacy. There was a great turn out and discussion on the night, with #irelibchat trending in the top 10 topics in Ireland. Below is a quick summary of some of the main topics and issues discussed:

A number of people raised the idea that information literacy instruction needs to begin much earlier than third level ("The damage is already done"). Many agreed however that embedding instruction and classes can help to make up some of this lost ground. There was also discussion of the role that IL plays in the transition between 2nd and 3rd level for students and one of the participants has just completed an MSc dissertation on this topic using the revised SCONUL model.

In terms of the practicalities of instructional design and delivery, several participants said they use the ANCIL model to inform their approach to IL instruction and/or use problem based enquiry and group work to facilitate learning: ("I try to identify my users info skills in class through engagement, discussion & challenges. Try to tailor instruction around that"; "Meeting the user in the middle is key for me"; "Have developed tailored programme for our students as it's a very specialist area"). The problem of IAKT syndrome (I already know that) and students' apathy towards IL instruction was also familiar to many ("There's a large number of students who are unaware that they lack infolit skills"; "Need to show students that infolit does make a difference: marketing the library and services").

The value of one-to-one sessions was also highlighted, though flagged as being an obvious problem from a resource-management / cost-benefit point of view. In some settings there are simply too many users to allow this service to be offered on a wider scale (academic libraries in particular), but in other sectors (public libraries, corporate libraries) it can be a very successful model to help guide users through the learning process.

One of the most interesting topics was the question of whether librarians should also have professional teaching qualifications. Some agreed that previous teaching experience and qualifications have significantly helped them to understand their users better, but others raised the point that many lecturers do not have teaching qualifications so librarians should not feel they need them to justify their teaching role. Most agreed that all those involved in teaching (including lecturers) should probably have teaching qualifications / training (but that is a separate issue!).

A great idea was suggested by @acarbery of a mentorship programme for librarians to help them to develop a teaching identity, and the importance of building communities of practice for teaching librarians was also raised.

For those who have not had enough of tweets about teaching, you can join in with the very active #edchatie discussions on Mondays.

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Dublin to get new main public library

The "Development Plan for Dublin City Public Libraries 2012-2016" has just been published. The most exciting part of the report from a public library viewpoint is that Dublin City Council has selected several sites on which to build a new massive central library for the city. The current main public library in the city is situated in the Ilac shopping centre on Henry Street. As well as standard facilities such as an OPAC and study spaces, the library also has a world literature collection, an extensive music collection and regularly hosts exhibitions and lectures. It was the site of Dublin's first central library and opened in 1986. However, there are huge problems with the current location. I was in the library recently and it comes across as being an unattractive, physically deteriorating, old, dark library with little room to expand. It has no on-street presence whatsoever and casual library users would have to have looked up its location to find it. Even in the shopping centre itself, it is not all that easy to find. The library does not even have toilet facilities. 

Little surprise then that the report describes the establishment of a 21st century library for Dublin city as the "key civic infrastructural objective for the capital city in the lifetime of this developmental plan". An 8000 square metre site is the ideal size for the council. This would compare favourably with best international practice as seen in cities like Helsinki, Copenhagen and Oslo who all have libraries in excess of this size. The hope is that the new library can "be at the heart of the literary life of the capital...be a meeting place both for people and for ideas...and imbue in its users a sense of ownership and  a sense that they, the citizens, will develop the library through the events that happen there." To address the lack of visibilty and street presence of the current site, Assistant City Manager Philip Maguire sets out his vision for the new library:

"It should be a cathedral for the city. A landmark, rising above it, visible to all around and allowing views over the city from within it. The building’s commanding presence marking its importance to the citizens and inviting people to ask the question ‘what is that place?’"

It all sounds fantastic but, it should be noted, these sort of promises have been made before. The objective of building Dublin a modern library was included in previous reports for the years 1996-2001 and 2000-2012. Undoubtedly the big obstacle will be funding. The new library failed to be built during the economic boom so will be harder to justify in the current economic situation. The report claims that "the ultimate cost of a new city library will depend on the kind of project undertaken. A new-build project will entail a different set of costs and challenges to those presented by a conservation project." Somewhat worryingly, there are no figures on how much the library will cost or where the money will come from. The council have identified a few possible sites for the new library. Plans to use the Ambassador cinema  have been abandoned since late 2011. Here's hoping that we will have our super library in Dublin before too long.

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Libraries 'buy' open access to particle physics journals

2012 will probably be remembered as the year when the Open Access debate entered the mainstream and reached a tipping point: the Elsevier boycott and the Academic Spring; the Finch Group report on expanding access to research; the increasing number of venues and models offering open access options for authors, and publishers protesting that OA is potentially "catastrophic".

Even the most ardent of OA supporters would probably agree that an exclusively 'green' OA model (i.e. unrestricted OA self-archiving) would be unsustainable in the long term, without fundamentally changing the model of peer-review and academic publishing. There are costs involved in scholarly publishing, and these must be paid for somehow - be it through public research funding and grants, (commensurate) subscription fees or author article process charges, depending on your ideological standpoint. 

However, the complexity of achieving open access in a way in which all stakeholders (including publishers) view as sustainable, has also sparked some innovate approaches to the scholarly publishing model - not least, the recent announcement of an open access agreement for twelve particle physics journals which will be funded by a library consortium:

"The consortium invited journals to bid for three-year open-access publishing contracts, and ranked them by an undisclosed algorithm that weighed their fees against their impact factors and the licences and delivery formats they offer. Under the deal, the journals will receive an average of €1,200 (US$1,550) per paper."

The agreement will see 90% of the research published in the field made openly available from 2014 onwards. It's an interesting approach that essentially equates to libraries funding the 'gold' article processing charges typically paid for by authors in a co-ordinated way in order to provide access for all. However, the problem of moral hazard and free-riding casts doubt as to whether this mechanism is sustainable (what is the incentive for libraries to remain financial contributors to the consortium when they could still access the research free of charge?) or transferable to other disciplines where research is not typically concentrated across a handful of key journal titles. Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent publishers from increasing the fee paid per article for subsequent deals in the same way that subscriptions costs have risen.

Perhaps most notable however, is that this approach maintains a direct link between libraries and the provision of access to research - in contrast with some of the alternative models (such as the 'author pays' approach or funding via public research agencies). If this traditional nexus is eroded, libraries may 'lose' one of their more obvious and visible roles. Obviously as librarians we know that we offer a lot more than simply providing access to subscription-based resources, but if libraries are cut out of the scholarly publishing chain, we may need to be much more creative and to work a lot harder in how we package and promote our more covert functions and services.

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Tackling assignments with the assignment planning tool

A while back I wrote about an assignment support tool that we were working on. The idea here is to assist students in getting to grips with this little devil called procrastination; effectively, the planner presents itself as a tangible tool helping students in their struggle to get continuous assessment items handed in on time, by splitting the research/writing process into managable and carefully timed chunks. Each step directs users to resources that will support them, just-in-time, along the way.

The tool lives on Moodle and was quietly launched there the other day. The new term starts next week and I mentioned the planner during inductions. The feedback from students and lecturers alike was very encouraging indeed. Some students approached me directly and enquired further about the planner.

Below are three screenshots to give you some visual context here.

Once you've entered the submission date (in this case 15th October) and hit plan schedule, the following picture presents itself....

If all goes well and usage is high, the planner will be refined and customised versions targeted at particular audiences.

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Writing as its own reward?: Report on the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution

The IWCSA Workshop was held in May this year to discuss some of the emerging issues and problems surrounding authorship and attribution in scholarly publishing. With research impact and citation metrics playing a key role in many funding and grant applications, the need to increase the consistency and transparency in how collaborators, contributors and authors are identified and credited appears timely. Moreover, the changing landscape of dissemination has led to fluid formats and new channels where traditional practices may seem somewhat incongruent.

The Report from the workshop* identifies several challenges including:

• Varied authorship conventions across disciplines;
• Increasing number of authors listed on articles;
• Inadequate definitions of authorship;
• Inability to identify individual and distinct contributions;
• and the need for new metrics that can capture new forms of scholarship and effort

One of the more striking statistics in relation to these issues is offered by Liz Allen at the Wellcome Trust, who reported that the number of authors listed on Wellcome Trust-associated genetics papers has increased nearly threefold between 2006 and 2010 (from 10.21 to 28.82). The potential for this kind of "author inflation" is also likely to increase as the number of largescale science consortium projects grows.

Some interesting solutions are presented, including the development of a common taxonomy for contributor roles and 'authorship' types in scholarly publications. This would help ensure standardisation and consistency across disciplines and help identify the weight of contributions in multi-author papers. Data and databases are  highlighted in particular as new units of scholarship that warrant attribution, and appropriate data citation standards would help support this. The authors also suggest developing a 'portfolio' approach to represent an individual's output and contribution, rather than the existing limited framework of metrics. No specifics are detailed in this regard, but no doubt elements such as altmetrics and qualitative measures could be incorporated. This approach could certainly prove valuable in capturing the richer and more diverse channels and roles inherent in scholarly publishing today, but the trade-off is that it may make at-a-glance quantitative comparisons over time or between researchers somewhat more tricky to distill. However if our current tools for measuring output are becoming increasingly disconnected from the new reality, perhaps this would not be such a great loss.


*IWCSA Report (2012). Report on the International Workshop on Contributorship and Scholarly Attribution, May 16, 2012. Harvard University and the Wellcome Trust. http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/attribution_workshop. Published 18 September 2012

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#irelibchat: Information Literacy - Weds 26th Sept 2012, 8:00-9:00pm

After a 'summer' break, #irelibchat returns next Wednesday, 26th September 8-9pm, with the topic of information literacy as suggested by @johnmac38.

Below are some suggested topics to steer the discussion but the chat will probably be a little more informal than previous sessions, so feel free to share any other ideas or questions relating to the theme. For those new to the concept of Twitter chats, simply search for the #irelibchat hashtag on Twitter to join in the dicussion, and remember to tag your own tweets with #irelibchat also.

1. How do you identify the information skills and literacy needs of your users?
2. What models or standards inform your information literacy/skills instruction?
3. What skills do librarians need to support IL effectively?
4. Do you use or share Open Educational Resources (OERs) in your IL instruction?
5. What is the biggest challenge or change you envisage for IL instruction in the future?

A couple of interesting links on the topic include a recent survey by @msnancygraham and @jsecker on Librarians, Information Literacy and Open Educational Resources and an article on Embedding information literacy skills as employability attributes from the latest issue of ALISS Quarterly. For more information on Twitter chats, check out How (and Why) to Participate in a Tweetchat.

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