My aim for the day is to try and read. This is little difficult as I am so tired – little Evie kept Helen and myself up most of the night! Oh well. The two documents read today:
Nicholas and Marden – their full British Library funded report in 1997 on the Information Needs of parents for children under five. I have written about their research before, needless to say this will be a key document for me, both for methodological design and literature review. My one personal beef with the work is- its brevity!
Booker, Di (Ed), Concept, challenge, conundrum: From Library skills to Information Literacy, Proceedings of the fourth national information literacy conference conducted by the University of South Australia, 1999.
There are two very good articles here (not to say the others are not – rather these two are more relevant to me), one by Ross Todd and the other by Susan Boyce. Both of these articles challenge and ask questions of the notion of information literacy. I am struck how many writers seem to simply accept IL and the ALA definition. Todd argues that we need to move away from the simply accepting the behaviourist models of IL and ask deeper questions about the form and substance of what IL actually is. Certainly, I agree with much Todd was writing. My own perception is, that in the 7-8 years since wrote his article for the conference, we have not moved on beyond embedding IL in either HE or school curriculum’s, I fear that there is little in the way of a sound scholarship and there is in fact no systematic theoretical basis for the subject, beyond a glorified approaches to bibliographic instruction. Is modern information literacy a type of ‘Emperors new clothes’ for librarians?
