Manchester bound
LILAC, the
Information Literacy conference, took part in Manchester this year and I was
fortunate enough to attend because of a generous bursary I won from Sheffield's
Information School. The iSchool is where I am currently studying for the
part-time, long-distance MA in Library and Information Services Management
(LISM). So yes, this was the first time I had the chance to meet fellow
students and my lecturers in person; at my first librarianship conference.
LILAC is a
unique experience and with more than 60 parallel sessions to choose from this
year, the diversity of cutting-edge information literacy research and practice
was well represented. One of the panels I attended (and more on that a bit
further down) discussed whether and in what way information literacy is its own
discipline of Library Science and - to put if flippantly - one look at
the programme bears much of the answer.
There is a
certain nervousness that comes with attending your first big conference (am I
even a real librarian yet?, who will want to talk to me?) but it was almost
immediately dispelled after Pam, Emmy, and I had set up the Information School
stand. We were greeted with open arms by a near constant stream of alumni and
other friends-we-haven't-met-yet [strangers] that came to the stand to talk
about either the fond memories they had made in their time with the Information
School or their plans for the future.
Day 1
Day 1
started off fantastically with this purple notebook we were handed at the door.
The paper quality is excellent and most of the notes that were the raw
materials for this blog are in this notebook. I also live tweeted every session I
attended so
will try my best not to bore you with every single detail of the sessions I
attended (if you are really interested you can read up on them on my Twitter
under #lilac22). Instead, I will focus on the key
learning I took from every session.
I sadly
had to miss most of my first session due to some confusion with the programme -
so the first key learning I took away from the conference was to double check
the latest version of the conference programme right after registration. Then,
note down any changes to the session you have booked.
Luckily, I
didn't have to be sad for long because session 2 was one of the ones I had been
looking forward to the most: "Introducing Information Literacy in the
House of Commons" with Anne-Lise Harding, the newly appointed Senior
Liaison Librarian at the House of Commons Library. She works with one of the
most important information literacy audiences in the country: reseachers for
House of Commons Select Committees. There are currently 171 of these committees
that are live and just in the period from 2017-2019 these committees saw a
combined 7419 witnesses, held 3121 meetings, and produced 757 reports based on
the works these researchers do.
Now, these
people already know how to research and Anne-Lise was aware of
that so the key learning I took from this session was that in order to produce
info lit modules that are valuable for your audience in a new job it is okay
and even good to take a step back to research that audience in order to find
where you as the librarian can add value. If you would like to see how that
research is now being leveraged to create bespoke modules, I highly recommend
Anne-Lise's posts on the CILIP
Information Literacy Group blog.
After
that, it was time for the first of three conference keynotes, which all took a
flipped approach. This means that we had to watch a video before the conference
began and jumped straight into Q&As with presubmitted questions, based on
these lectures. This first keynote consisted of a panel of 4 LIS students from
our host institution Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and I can only
admire the bravery and guts it took to be that panel. They had to speak in
front of hundreds of librarians and an audience that included some of the
biggest name in our field like ALA President-Elect Emily Drabinski (current
Twitter follower count: 19,060). The key learning here was that it is never to
early to engage with your community, young voices matter as well.
But also,
please speak into the microphone if you want it to be heard.
https://twitter.com/0ptimistBiscuit/status/1513479916569956353?s=20&t=JOY3lejKEpZ3UgzOCMP5KA
They
keynote was followed by lunch.
The third
session, I attended on Day 1 was "Moving forward as one university"
by our very own University of Sheffield librarians. They outlined how they were
able to get prestige and recognition for their work by changing their language
and visual identity to align with university priorities under a flexible one
university approach. They managed to do so without sacrificing on content. They
changed only module names away from "information
literacy" to "research skills" and "critical thinking"
since consultation had shown that these terms were more meaningful to other
university stakeholders. My key learning here was how a simple change in
language can bring more engagement with your content. This in turn can open up
new opportunities to embed one's service offer deeper into our communities.
My final
session for the day was "Teaching Data Literacy and Data Visualization as
a One-Credit Course" by Tatiana Usova, whose paper I had cited in one of my
INF6553 Information Literacy courseworks. I strongly believe that adding data
literacy teaching to our service models is in our future and it was nice to see
that I am not alone in that belief. My key learnings from this session was that
it is okay to start small as well as that going to university alumni meetings
can be an important venue to spark ideas for new additions to the service.
After that
it was time for networking and well-earned drinks. Seeing a non-alcoholic fizz
option was particularly appreciated.
https://twitter.com/0ptimistBiscuit/status/1513554590226075656?s=20&t=S0c8pjEMh6YMIovETPcn7A
Day 2
Day 2
opened with a keynote by Marilyn Clarke on her decolonising work as Director of
Library Services at Goldsmiths University. It was flipped as well so once again
almost entirely questions and answers. This prompted a fantastically
wide-ranging discussion and left me with the key learning that if we want to
bring our decolonisation wins into the future we need to teach more people how
to catalogue and work metadata. Local contexts will be lost if people do not
know how to use the magic of MARC21 500 fields to make them visible to every
browser on the catalogue. This needs to be part of doing the work.
Next, I
had the chance to learn about the LibSmart series of modules that the Library
Academic Support unit at the University of Edinburgh libraries run. Their
session was delivered by Christine Love-Rodgers and SarahLouise McDonald and
titled "Catapulted by Covid-19: hitting new information literacy targets
at the University of Edinburgh". Their unit supports 45,615 students
across 11 library sites and Covid saw them bringing back and updating online
courses they had previously dropped due to low interest. I really liked what
they do with digital badges (every module comes with it's own badge) and my key
learning from their session was how important it is to have a thorough comms
strategy when launching a new service - one that has "lines to take"
both internally aimed at frontline staff as well as externally aimed at getting
allied student services to promote the new service.
Session 6
of my conference was "Supersize (and digitize) my session!" with
Chris Thorpe from City University library detailing he and his team's mad
scramble to fulfil ever increasing expectations from their academic departments
mid-pandemic. Trust in each other was essential in this and my key learning
from the session is best summed up in these two quotes:
- "We are trying our best
and that is all you can ask."
- "Perfection is the enemy
of done and good-enough."
They will be my mantra in the next crisis situation.
After
lunch, I had the privilege to be in the most fascinating discussion I had all
conference. This was sparked by Geoff Walton's "Mainstreaming information
literacy: analysing Educational Preventing Violent Extremism programmes
(EPVEs)" which detailed his work with the Home Office on evaluating
programmes he could not give us more details off. The discussion covered
approaches to EPVEs in Austria, the US, and the UK.
The paper on this work is a
fascinating read and
I cannot recommend it highly enough. This session taught me using a concrete
example how information literacy work can and has a role to play in improving
lives in an acute and emerging public policy area. I don't think I can
overstate, how important this session was to me and my learning journey. It was
the kind of thing, you hope to encounter at every conference, where the entire
room brought in interesting points of view on the topic and that gave all the
theory you have been looking at a concrete edge. I can only hope that the next
bursary winners also get a session like it.
https://twitter.com/0ptimistBiscuit/status/1513875605762232338?s=20&t=hk7jPPgL0g5IvjZSWDuyPw
All heady,
I headed to "Wikipedia, Student Activism, and the Ivory Tower" by
Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian-In-Residence at the University of Edinburgh. He
showed us the work they
are doing with
students there in an attempt to make the case to us for resetting the
relationship between academia and Wikipedia. My key learning from his session
was how important it is to give space to allied non-librarians at library
conferences. He left us with some key Wikipedia principles to bring to our
students:
- use it to orient yourself,
don't cite it.
- write it, don't cite it.
- cite the sources it cites.
I finished
day 2, with some heavy theory in a session that was a short introductory
lecture followed by a workshop. Dr Karen F. Kaufmann introduced a
work-in-progress project she is doing with Dr Clarence Maybe. Her session was
titled: "Information Literacy: Elements of a Maturing Discipline" and
contained the discussion I mentioned at the very beginning of this blog. It was
difficult stuff and I cannot claim to have understood it all but I was deeply impressed
with the fierceness with which the assembled room argued for why it is
important to see information literacy as its own discipline - it makes
conferences and spaces for idea generation like the one we were at right now
possible in the first place.
Having learned
how rightfully proud librarians are of their chosen discipline it was time to
close the conference for the day and head to the legendary LILAC dinner.
The room
went OFF when the DJ put Mr Brightside on and I knew then that I was amongst my
own.
https://twitter.com/0ptimistBiscuit/status/1514317604579651587?s=20&t=hk7jPPgL0g5IvjZSWDuyPw
Day 3
The final
day.
I started
it by heading to "Exploring how university lecturers construct their
knowledge of information and digital literacy" held by Paul Cannon of the
University of West Scotland. He presented work from his ongoing PhD and
together with Geoff Walton's session it was for me the most valuable stuff I
was able to attend at LILAC 2022. Lecturers are one of - if not the key
stakeholder for us in academic libraries so I was fascinated to hear what they
make of our concepts. The results were sobering.
Paul found
little evidence of them mapping their idea of digital competencies onto
existing information literacy frameworks in any coherent way. Everyone disagrees
about what words mean what things. Their understanding of digital competence is
really still at an embryonic stage. I came away thinking that there is a real
potential for a longitudinal study here, where the same lecturers Paul had
already interviewed could be shown these frameworks again and again as we are
moving into a post-covid, post-digital only world. My key learning here was
more roundabout: it was learning that I had already learned enough about
information literacy (a discipline, I had not been exposed to before taking on
this MA) to understand where Paul's critique of different information literacy
frameworks were coming from.
After a quick
coffee, it was then time for our third and final keynote with (as she found out
later that day) President-elect of ALA Emily Drabinski. This was another super
wide-ranging discussion about power and the library that I struggled a lot to
reproduce on Twitter. The thing I took away however was that adding an
analytical argument to your teaching ("these are the structural reasons
why you are struggling with this database") can make your session more fun
not just for your students but also yourself - because you would aim
to have them leave your sessions smarter, not just better skilled. And to
achieve that, you have to learn and examine systems.
https://twitter.com/HidingHeather/status/1514187530014498820?s=20&t=flajL5OCw14mSz98SERxAQ
I
finished my time at LILAC with a workshop aimed at refining the work of MILA,
the Media and Information Literacy Alliance, as well as what I would describe as a
"fun" talk. It was about the island of St Helena and an ongoing
research project that aims to map how the information landscape on the island
will change after the arrival of highspeed internet. My key learning from these
last two sessions was that to end your conference on a high do something active
that is centred right in the middle of the discussion you were having over the
last three days as well as something that is related to your work but so off
the wall, it will never come up in your practice. "Information in
isolation: the arrival of high-speed internet in a very remote community"
by Andrew Whitworth fulfilled that need.
#lilac22
Final stats
Number of
days attended: 3
Number of sessions attended: 16
Number of tweets posted: 328
Number of complementary pastries eaten: 8
Number of complementary biscuits eaten: 12
Number of things learned: uncountable
And to
end, I would just like to express my heartfelt thanks to the conference
organising committee, the volunteers that attended to our every need throughout
the three days, as well as the Information School here at Sheffield for making
this opportunity available.
I think
you can tell I had fun.
https://twitter.com/meaohara/status/1514242825076023303?s=20&t=flajL5OCw14mSz98SERxAQ
- Arved Kirschbaum
MA Library & Information Services Management student
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