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Summary

We could easily have coined the phrase ‘Information Literacy 2.0’ when we wrote our first book. There was very little usage of this term at that time, but we have no regrets. To use such a label then would have threatened hours of creating a definition, satisfying no one! Since then, Špiranec and Zorica (2010) have interpreted Information Literacy 2.0 as a subset of information literacy (IL), and we shall return to this later. It was an exciting time, and I believe it was useful then to concentrate more on how the tools could be used to deliver IL. We could, however, have spent more time considering the effects it would have on what it meant to be information literate. That is the aim of this chapter!

What is IL?

In the past the seemingly endless debates about what information literacy is and whether it is a good label have been a huge bore. It is so easy to say that we must define something before we can do anything about it. Most practising librarians who are involved with educating their users just get on with it and don't agonize over the niceties. It concerns me that much of the research in IL never really permeates down to practitioners, not least because of the portentous language used in the name of scholarship to make it appear appropriately impressive. How many paradigm shifts have you read about? Should I be concerned about the ontological and epistemological positions of my praxis?! Julien and Williamson (2010) are similarly concerned about the disconnect between researchers and practitioners, but for rather different reasons. They are concerned that researchers criticize the IL standards approach but, with some exceptions, are not replacing it with anything based on sufficient observed behaviour.

When necessary, we have to provide IL documentation for institutional learning and teaching plans or reviews, and these tend to refer to generally recognized frameworks like the Big Six or SCONUL Seven Pillars. This can be extremely useful to aid discussion and understanding among colleagues from outside the library. The danger is that they become the blueprint for our IL initiatives day by day. Such frameworks too easily become a series of tick-boxes for skills development. Markless (2009) questioned whether we should ‘continue to present students with generic IL frameworks, models and processes’: IL has always been more complex than this.

Summary

Introduction

[W]eb 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites … have become important tools for equipping new library and information science (LIS) graduates with the competencies and skills that fit with the dynamic, changing information market.

(Al-Daihani, 2010)

This chapter describes the development of a new online course on social media offered by the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The creation of a course on an information and communication technology (ICT) topic involves consideration of many theoretical, practical and structural matters, and it requires perseverance on the part of instructors with regard to devising content. Social media, and how library and information professionals use them to serve users, is a constantly shifting domain. The field itself is incredibly volatile. A few social media tools seem stable enough (think of Facebook, Wikipedia or Twitter), but generally speaking, new tools appear (and disappear) with regularity. Not surprisingly, it complicates the teaching of a subject when there is a lack of evidence and the components making up the whole landscape shift regularly. As a set of tools for learning, technology is rarely enough to ensure that learning will take place (Bawden et al., 2007). On the contrary, in teaching the use of specific tools, the instructor should emphasize skills and literacies over discrete tasks (Secker, 2008; Giustini, 2008).

And so it is with social media. The two learning objectives that arose repeatedly in the development of this course were: 1) the importance of exposing students to new digital formats and channels of information on social networking sites; and 2) critiquing the use of social networking tools in the provision of information services. In addition, the course makes an effort to focus attention on assessing the quality, accuracy and relevance of information found through social media. Fortunately, developing content is an iterative, dynamic process – and with each new offering, the instructor has a chance to ‘get it right’. My chapter is a reflection on these scholarly matters and on what I have learned from teaching LIS students about social technologies.

Summary

What are access points and why do we need them?

When confronted for the first time with the phrase ‘access points’ you might think that you are being faced with a piece of modern cataloguing jargon. And you might be right.

However, the phrase is indicating the concept of providing structured headings that the catalogue user can predict and, therefore, use to form successful search strategies – search strategies that retrieve the information they are seeking (and ideally only the information they are seeking).

In its ‘Explanation of Key Terms’, RDA 5.1.4 states, ‘The term access point refers to a name and/or title, term, code, etc., under which information pertaining to a specific work will be found.’

In other words, an access point is the catalogue user's route into the bibliographic record for the publication (book, CD, website and so on) she is seeking. More specifically, an access point is a specific piece of data that catalogue users can and should expect to provide them with a way into the bibliographic record.

For example, if I am looking for Jane Eyre, I expect to be able to search under the title ‘Jane Eyre’ and find all the records in the catalogue for those books, film and TV adaptations, music scores and so on with the phrase ‘Jane Eyre’ in their title. In other words, I expect that knowing the title will give me access to the item's record. If I run a search for the title ‘Jane Eyre’ and nothing is returned, I may assume that the library does not have a copy of that book or film, or any other adaptation of Jane Eyre.

‘Every reader his book’

This clearly relates the function of access points back to Ranganathan's Laws discussed in Chapter 1:

Every book its reader.

Every reader his book.

(Ranganathan, 1957)

In providing access points like title, author(s) and subject, we are essentially predicting the most common ways in which our catalogue users will want to search for an item and ensuring that when they search in these ways they will find the item they are looking for.

Summary

Introduction

Unsurprisingly, one of the frequently asked questions on the RDA website is ‘Will I have to make changes to my cataloguing records?’ The official answer given is:

The JSC agreed early on that records created by using RDA would be compatible with AACR2 records and that any instance where incompatibility might exist would be scrutinized very carefully before recommending a change. This commitment holds true today. But, there will be a few instances where headings will require modification, such as the headings for ‘Bible’. Using computers’ abilities for global updating will make these changes considerably easier than in preonline system days.

(Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA, 2010a)

This chapter takes as its starting point an example record from Appendix M in the draft of RDA (Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA, 2008a and b) and compares it with a record produced under AACR2.

We are working from the text published on 31 October 2008, which the Joint Steering Committee issued as a draft and acknowledged contained typographic and other errors. We have corrected these in the light of the examples issued by the Library of Congress in 2011 (Library of Congress Cataloging and Acquisitions, 2011).

Example: Book 1

Taylor, Arlene G. The organization of information. 2nd ed. London: Libraries

Unlimited, 2004.

Table 6.1 on the following pages maps the information in Appendix M to the existing record on the Library of Congress website (Library of Congress, 2003). The information is listed in the order set by the RDA elements section of Appendix M. A blank space in the table means we could not find an equivalent.

Let us work through the equivalency table and discuss how it exemplifies the similarities and differences between RDA and AACR2.

Title proper

RDA 2.2.2 deals with the ‘preferred source of information’ – the new term for AACR2's ‘chief source of information’. RDA 2.2.2.2 specifies the preferred source for ‘Resources consisting of one or more pages, leaves, sheets or cards (or images of one or more pages, leaves sheets or cards)’. As a standard book, our title meets these criteria. There is no change here from AACR2 – we are instructed to ‘use the title page, title sheet, or title card (or image thereof) as the preferred source of information’.

Summary

I have delivered many presentations suggesting that the IL and Web 2.0 connection might be overplayed (Godwin, 2009a). How much evidence is there that libraries and librarians are really viewing the information landscape as different, requiring Web 2.0 to be included and used to teach IL? How much impact is it having on student learning?

Luo (2010) conducted a survey of IL instruction librarians who were members of the Information Literacy Instruction Discussion List sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Fifty valid responses were received, which were then followed up by eight interviews which revealed some great ideas of how librarians have employed blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, YouTube and Flickr. Luo separates his respondents into those who use Web 2.0 for their own purposes, those who use them for facilitating delivery of IL to students and those who use the facilities of certain Web 2.0 tools to enhance the teaching of specific aspects of IL. An example of the latter was where the respondent had used Flickr to get the students to collect some digital images and apply attribution, in order to explain Creative Commons, and then doing a similar exercise with Wikipedia. Luo concludes that ‘it is indisputable that Web 2.0 is becoming more and more prevalent and its value to facilitating IL instruction is recognized’ (Luo, 2010, 39), but more research is needed, particularly around assessing how the students react to it and how it affects learning outcomes. There is still a feeling that students regard social media as their own province and resent their use for academic purposes.

It is possible to get some clues regarding take-up from Tripathi (2009), who surveyed university libraries: 82 in the UK, 151 in the USA, 37 in Canada and 7 in Australia. Of the 45% that had blogs, 20.53% used them for search tips and 8.53% for IL. Most of the 11% that used podcasts and the 6% that used vodcasts did so for some IL purpose. Tripathi also notes that the 300 University Grants Commission-recognized universities in India had yet to start using Web 2.0 tools. In the Philippines, Lapuz (2009) enthusiastically and successfully championed their use in library schools, but found school teacher-librarians much less receptive.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part literacy is discussed in terms of its ‘functional’ nature, as it provides the basis for social interaction, be it in print or digital worlds. The second part presents the view that there is a dynamic relationship between literacy and the information environment in which it operates. This relationship, which defines the functional attributes of literacy, is mapped onto a timeline that illustrates the shift from print to web environments. As the title of this chapter suggests, transliteracy is promoted as the literacy that is needed to function in a Web 2.0 world. This is because, as current technologies offer new ‘applications of established processes of knowledge construction and sharing’ (Thomas et al., 2007), the competences underpinning these processes need to be updated. Hence the need to move from information literacy to transliteracy. For those who are not familiar with it, the term ‘transliteracy’ was coined by Professor Thomas to describe ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’ (Thomas et al., 2007). The two main practices of Web 2.0, namely the reorganizing and sharing of information and knowledge that are undertaken collectively (Witteman and O'Grady, 2008), are discussed here in terms of their impact on web users, turning them from consumers into ‘produsers’ of information (Bruns, 2008a, 2). The concept of produser is analysed later on. For now, it suffices to say that this is a compound term derived by the merging of ‘producer’ and ‘user’. The exclusion of Web 3.0 from this timeline is deliberate, as we need to establish the functional literacy operating in a Web 2.0 environment before we can turn our attention to the functional literacy associated with the semantic, sentient, mobile and virtual environments that characterize a Web 3.0 world (O'Reilly and Battelle, 2009, 2).

Functional literacy

Whilst to be functionally literate means simply to be an ‘active participant in society’ (Ipri, 2011), it is not surprising that functional literacy means different things in different contexts. In its broad social function, literacy capitalizes on individuals’ potential to foster the collective development of local and global communities (UNESCO, 2008, 1).

Summary

Background

As I write, public libraries in the UK are going through a period of change possibly unparalleled in their 200-year history. The economic situation is causing major cuts to public library budgets across the board. In addition to the usual wave of cuts to services, stock funds and opening hours, a growing number of authorities are passing the running of branch libraries to local community groups, commonly to parish councils. Along with the pressure to reduce budgets, another associated driver of change is about meeting the requirements of the UK government's policy initiative called the Big Society, which is encouraging local authorities to engage more with local communities in the management and delivery of services. A third driver of change is the more subtle force of customer demand: there are some indications that online use of public libraries is rising to match physical use, as more and more people use the internet to access the library services outlined below.

All three of these factors are leading to an increasing interest in Web 2.0. Its characteristics of potential for access to and by huge user groups, opportunities to engage with communities through social networks, and user-generated content mean that it offers some useful tools for improving productivity and achieving Big Society engagement with services.

A key dilemma that public libraries are facing, as I write, is the mismatch between what customers expect to be able to do with library services online and what local authorities – the organizations that run public libraries – allow libraries to do. The most common complaint amongst public librarians is about restrictive policies – the biggest barrier to greater engagement with the public. The majority of local authorities ban their staff from using social media and this ban severely restricts both staff's understanding of the technologies and their use of them to interact with customers. However, there are signs that these restrictions are loosening up: there has been an influential report from SOCITM (2010), and some very useful work done by the Local Government Improvement and Development agency (LGID). The LGID runs the Communities of Practice for Public Service website, ‘a community platform supporting professional social networks across the public sector’, many of which cover social media, and which many local government officers have joined.

Summary

This book has been three years in the making. It was commissioned to bridge the gap between John Bowman's Essential Cataloguing (last published before MARC revised its series fields from 440 and 490 to 490 alone) and Shawne Miksa's North American textbook on the new international cataloguing standard Resource Description and Access, to be published in the UK in 2013 (Miksa, n.d.).

It aims to meet the needs of two markets:

Summary

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

(H. G. Wells)

Introduction

Recent research suggests that the information-seeking behaviour and needs of students are changing (CIBER/UCL, 2008; SCONUL, 2011 among others), driven largely by the changing experiences and expectations of ‘the Google generation’, who have grown up with access to the internet being the norm. While the Google generation and ‘digital native’ terms have been debated and widely criticized (Jones et al., 2010), it is clear that information literacy programmes over the next five years will need to adapt and respond to the needs of current students.

This case study describes a short project based at Cambridge University Library and funded by the Arcadia Programme (http://arcadiaproject. lib.cam.ac.uk), a three-year initiative designed to explore the role of academic libraries in the digital age. The project ran from May until July 2011 and sought to develop a practical curriculum for information literacy that meets the needs of the undergraduate student entering higher education over the next five years.

A new curriculum for information literacy: project overview

Aims and objectives

The project sought to develop a practical curriculum for information literacy that meets the needs of the undergraduate student entering higher education over the next five years. Specifically, the project aimed:

Summary

This chapter covers the history of the new code, picks up on some of the changes indicated elsewhere in the book, and finally offers practical advice for libraries and other cataloguing agencies considering if, how and when they should make the change from AACR2 to RDA.

Timeline to change

Let us start with the simplest narrative – the administrative history of the new code. The history of RDA is outlined on the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) website at www.rdajsc. org/rda.html#background, and referenced in most publications on the new code, including Chris Oliver's recent book Introducing RDA: a guide to the basics (Oliver, 2010).

RDA grew out of the process begun in 2004 to produce the next edition of the AngloAmerican Cataloguing Rules. Following the circulation of the draft of the first part of AACR3, it was decided in 2005 that a new approach was needed, and work began under the title RDA: resource description and access.

Between 2005 and 2009 various drafts of the new code were circulated for constituency review, and members of the cataloguing community around the world offered feedback and opinions.

A key shift between AACR2 and RDA is the new code's conception as a digital product. In June 2010, the RDA Toolkit was presented to the world, with a free trial period of just over three months. Later in 2010, a paper version of RDA was published, in response to demands from the community, and particularly from smaller institutions which could not afford the annual subscription to the online product. However, throughout the process, the JSC has stressed that RDA is not a paper product, and full understanding (and updates) is available only through the online version.

One impact of the transparency of the processes around the creation of the new code is an awareness on the part of the worldwide cataloguing community that it has not yet been decided when the major AngloAmerican cataloguing agencies – the Library of Congress and the British Library, will adopt the code. Because the processes preparing for previous codes were more closed, the average cataloguer in the stacks did not feel the need to engage with them until the Library of Congress and the British Library were beginning to implement them.

Summary

Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 was something of a journey into the unknown. The Web 2.0 ‘characters’, as I often referred to them in my talks, were new, and to some, exciting. It was a fun time to write a book and we didn't think there'd be a sequel: despite requests from Facet Publishing, we would not emulate the Hollywood blockbusters and spawn another offering. So what changed my mind? One evening, while I was ambling home from the bus stop, reflecting gently to the strains of Telemann (or was it Siouxsie and the Banshees?) via an iPod, the possibility of a book seized me. A few days later I visited Jo Parker, my fellow editor, at the Open University and very tentatively suggested a sequel. To my great surprise she agreed to come on board – and here we have it.

Web 2.0 has affected the delivery of information literacy (IL), and somehow seems to have also affected what it means to be information literate. There has been much IL research questioning its nature, and I suspect that most of this has not reached the majority of practitioners. Indeed, I suspect there is something of a disconnect between IL research and IL practitioners. They often produce the MEGO (my eyes glaze over) effect on me, and I suspect that I am not alone! This is on the one hand understandable, due to the complex language used in some research articles, but on the other hand regrettable, because important insights are being gained that all practitioners should know about. My selection of these is bound to be incomplete, and I apologize in advance for any MEGO effects caused by my own writing! In the first chapters of this book I shall set the scene with a detailed discussion of what has happened to information literacy and Web 2.0 in the past three years. What was Library 2.0? Was it over-hyped? How did it connect with the so-called web generation? Then we will look at how social media have become mainstream and where there have been successes and failures. We will then examine what effects Web 2.0 has had on information literacy.

Summary

Introduction

We would all agree that the internet is in a constant state of change. There are, however, many different types of change that we can observe. For example, there is the very crude measurement of the number of hours of YouTube video posted every minute, the number of tweets per second and the number of blogs that are created. These figures are generally quite mind boggling, but because they are available in easy, bite-sized chunks they are easy to digest and understand.

What are rather less easy to understand, however, or indeed to know, are some of the longer-term changes in trends that influence the growth and change of the internet. We could, for example, consider the way in which the internet has become more of a medium for the creator than for the consumer; or the extent to which newspaper publishing has moved onto the net at the expense of the more traditional printed format; or the way in which various groups or indeed societies are able to change both politically and socially. What is of particular interest to the information professional, however, is the slow but sure way in which the whole process of internet search is moving away from the institutional and towards the individual. This is of course part and parcel of the increasing importance of the information creator and needs to be considered within that context.

Issues of personalization

Search engines have always had as their Holy Grail the ability to tailor their results directly to the individual's needs. Once they are able to do that they can also much more closely tailor the adverts that they present to individual users, and thus make more money for themselves. Until now it has been almost impossible to achieve this except in the very broadest sense. Search engines have had to rely on what sites people click on and the links to those sites. With the rising volume of individual data flooding onto the net, however, search engines can now start to become much more precise in the way in which they tailor their information. Let's assume a really basic example. Suppose that you are interested in finding out about librarians.

Summary

Introduction

University students are surprisingly adept at finding information; only, it isn't usually the kind of information that concerns their instructors. From using Wikipedia to learn about their favourite pop-singer's time in primary school, to finding health information in Yahoo! Answers, to evaluating mobile phones based on Amazon user reviews, students appeal to a range of Web 2.0 information resources in their personal lives. Yet these same students are perplexed by library resources. Keywords? Abstracts? Boolean searching? Why does it have to be so hard? At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the instruction team at the Lupton Library has decided to address this disconnect head on and make students’ pre-existing search behaviours an integral part of library instruction. Rather than focus on the differences between scholarly and popular research, we focus on the similarities. Our approach draws heavily upon the concept of transliteracy.

What is transliteracy?

The concept of transliteracy has its roots in the Transliteracies Project, an interdisciplinary collective of scholars from the University of California-Santa Barbara dedicated to studying the myriad ways in which online reading has complicated traditional conceptions of literacy (http://transliteracies.english. ucsb.edu). Shortly after the inaugural 2005 Transliteracies Conference, Professor Sue Thomas of De Montfort University adapted the concept in a more generalized form as the core area of enquiry for the Production and Research in Transliteracy (PART) group. This working group is actively enquiring into the impact of new technologies on the broader notion of literacy as a communicative skill. The PART working definition of transliteracy is, at this point, the most commonly cited one. Accordingly, ‘transliteracy’ is defined as ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’ (Thomas et al., 2007).

In this sense, transliteracy is not simply about the canonical sense of literacy qua reading and writing. Transliteracy takes a holistic view of the increasingly proliferating means of communication at our disposal and it focuses on the cognitive abilities inherent in transferring meaning between communication systems. From the intersubjectivity of social media tools to the intertextuality of Web 2.0 mash-ups, to new frontiers in immersive storytelling, the digital environment – and especially the Web 2.0 paradigm – has led to a distribution of literacy skills across a multiplicity of media options.

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2 - Information literacy and Library 2.0: an update

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14 - An online course on social media for student librarians: teaching the information skills and literacies of social media

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Contributors

4 - Access points and headings

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6 - AACR and RDA

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3 - The story so far: progress in Web 2.0 and information literacy

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10 - Examples

5 - Web 2.0: from information literacy to transliteracy

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Acknowledgements

18 - Helping the public online: Web 2.0 in UK public libraries

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Preface

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Index

16 - ANCIL: a new curriculum for information literacy: case study

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5 - RDA: resource description and access

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Introduction

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Dedication

4 - The changing web: sites to social

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PART 2 - CASE STUDIES

PART 3 - WHAT IT MEANS FOR INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS

15 - Transliteracy and teaching what they know

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