Volume 2 number 3 of Codex: the Journal of the Louisiana Chapter of the ACRL has been published. It is open access, but you need to register. Articles include:
- "Assessment of Information Literacy: A Critical Bibliography": Robin Brown, Phyllis Niles (pp.100-149). An interesting annotated bibliography: as you can tell from the following extract from the abstract, the comments are personal to the authors "The authors focused on actual research studies, eliminating purely theoretical discussions, as valuable as they may be. The undergraduate population was the primary focus, in keeping with the authors’ context of a community college. Assessment of student learning was also a primary parameter as well ... This is a critical bibliography. The authors have highlighted the articles that they felt are most important, or most interesting. The commentary is not really systematic, so the lack of any particular point of view in a summary should not be taken as a criticism. The authors hope that readers will get an overview of the field of assessment of information literacy, and perhaps have their curiosity sparked or rekindled."
- "Assessing Undergraduate Information Literacy Skills Using Project SAILS": J.B. Hill, Carol Macheak, John Siegel (pp.23-37)
http://journal.acrlla.org/index.php/codex/index
Photo by Sheila Webber: Dessert and tea at Betty's tea rooms, June 2013.

Professor Diane Nahl (Adra Letov in Second Life) will lead a discussion on: Hines, S.S. and Hines, E. (2012). "Faculty and Librarian Collaboration on Problem-based Learning." Journal of Library Innovation, 3(2) http://www.libraryinnovation.org/article/view/201

When: Tuesday 18 June noon SL time (which is 8pm UK time and the same as US pacific time: see http://tinyurl.com/ocpzqbc for times elsewhere)

Where: Infolit iSchool Journal Club in the virtual world Second Life, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/106/208/30/. Everyone is welcome to join the one-hour discussion. You need a SL avatar and the Second Life browser installed on your computer.

A Centre for Information Literacy Research event. (The picture shows our last meeting)

The open-access Journal of information literacy volume 7 issue 1 has been published. The articles are:
- Information literacy and embedded librarianship in an online graduate programme by Swapna Kumar, Mary E Edwards
- Information literacy as a facilitator of ethical practice in the professions by Marc Forster
- Developing an evidence-based practice healthcare lens for the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model by Michelle Dalton
- Information literacy in the programmatic university accreditation standards of select professions in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia by Cara Bradley
- Reinventing classroom space to re-energise information literacy instruction by Suzanne Julian
- Welsh Information Literacy Project: Phase III update by Síona Murray
- A multilingual information literacy resources tool by Forest Woody Horton
- RIDLs: a collaborative approach to information literacy by Stéphane Goldstein
- Delivering information literacy support internationally: a report of a visit to the University of Nottingham's overseas campuses by Jenny Coombs
- Information literacy skills in Year 14 school leaving pupils - are they ready for third level study? by Christine Marie McKeever
(Plus there are conference reports and book reviews)
http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL
Photo by Sheila Webber: meadowflowers, Lund Botanic Gardens, May 2013

Volume 18 number 2 of the open access journal Information research has been published. It includes:
- Uta Papen: Conceptualising information literacy as social practice: a study of pregnant women's information practices.
- Misook Heo: Assessing user needs of Web portals: a measurement model
- Wee-Kheng Tan and Yu-Chung Chang: Improving users' credibility perception of travel expert blogs: useful lessons from television travel shows
http://informationr.net/ir/18-2/infres182.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Osmunda regalis safsa, in Lund Botanic Gardens, May 2013

The (North American) Citation project "is a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.... Our team systematically studies student papers that were produced in college writing courses and that draw on sources. Our purpose is to describe how student writers use their sources." They analyse student papers to see how students have used sources: "quotation, summary, paraphrase, or patchwriting". They give a detailed account of their methods. In analysing the student papers they went to the original sources to see how they had been used. The first phase concentrated on first year undergraduate writing classes, but the second phase will include a wider range of papers. The results of the initial pilot study are reported in:
Howard, R., Rodrigue, T. and Serviss, T.(2010) “Writing from sources, writing from sentences.” Writing and pedagogy, 2(2), 177-192. http://writing.byu.edu/static/documents/org/1176.pdf
and show e.g. that patchwriting (taking some text and changing bits here and there) and paraphrasing were very common, but summarising (which would require more effort and understanding) was not. The website is at http://site.citationproject.net/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Interior of a house in the Kulturen Open Air Museum, Lund, Sweden, May 2013

Interesting new free publication: Kickbusch, I. (ed) et al. (2013) Health literacy: the solid facts. World Health Organization (WHO). ISBN 978 92 890 0015 4. http://www.euro.who.int/en/what-we-do/health-topics/environment-and-health/urban-health/publications/2013/health-literacy.-the-solid-facts
The aim is to influence policy-makers, and the main sections are called:
- Making the case for investing in strengthening health literacy;
- Taking action to create and strengthen health literacy–friendly settings; and
- Developing policies for health literacy at the local, national and European Region levels.
The publication is about 70 pages long and summarises a good deal of evidence and examples. There are also links to follow e.g. I noticed a short consultation document from the Institute of Medicine proposing Attributes of a Health Literate Organization (http://www.iom.edu/%7E/media/Files/Perspectives-Files/2012/Discussion-Papers/BPH_HLit_Attributes.pdf)
Photo by Sheila Webber: Planted chair in the Kulturen open air museum, Lund, Sweden, May 2013

The (USA) National Association for Media Literacy Education has its annual conference July 12-13, 2013 in Los Angeles, USA. The conference theme is Intersections: Teaching and Learning Across Media. Keynotes are Tiffany Shlain, Filmmaker and Founder of Webby Awards, and Jim Berk, CEO of Participant Media. http://2013.namle.net/

The presentations from the 2012 Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy (held September 21-22, 2012) are at http://dspaceprod.georgiasouthern.edu:8080/jspui/handle/10518/5214.
This year's Georgia Conference on Information Literacy takes place August 23-24 2013 in Savannah, Georgia, USA. The keynote speaker is Alison Head on Information Literacy through the Lens of the Student Experience. http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: The young peregrines have just left the nest but are still keeping to the church tower. In this rather poor picture you can't see the 2 on the ledge, but you can see a parent bird perched on the webcam.

There are a couple of just-published outcomes from the Research Information Literacy and Digital Scholarship (RILADS) project. One is a report from one strand of the project "looking at the identification and promotion of good practice in information training in UK HE [Higher Education]" (with a focus on researcher training). They developed some questions for evaluating training courses etc. and trialed the instrument in some UK universities. This also enabled them to gain insight into the type of training provided. The report is at http://rilads.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/riladsreportmay13final.pdf
As part of this, RILADS identified 15 examples of good practice in information literacy resources (for training postgraduates). These are linked from: http://rilads.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/short-list-of-good-practice-examples-of-information-literacy-delivery-in-uk-he/
Apologies for a few days away from blogging, one excuse is that the graphics card on my work computer went phut.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Duck showing interest in research conversations, Lund, May 2013

I will do a couple of blog posts from the COLRIC (Council for Learning Resources in Colleges) information literacy event in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which focuses on the Further Education sector. Grazyna Kuczera's session was called: To measure or not to measure. She is from Northampton College, which won the 2011 Association of Colleges (AoC) Beacon Award for the Effective Integration of Libraries/Learning Resources Centres in Curriculum Delivery (More info about this here http://www.northamptoncollege.ac.uk/news/item.aspx?NewsItem=724) She is far left in the poor-quality picture above.

Grazyna stressed that you had to develop impact measures that really told you something about how the students' learning experience has changed. She introduced a picture of a tree, with the library at the base of the trunk, i.e. vital in order to get the tree to grow leaves and fruit. However you had to convince and influence others that students would not flourish in the same way if the library was not there. She mentioned the Huddersfield University project which got meaning out of visitor statistics by correlating them with class of degree. Here is a quick link to the archived version of an article about this: http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/7940/1/Academic_library_non__low_use_revised_final_version.pdfGoodall
Homing in on her picture of the tree, she identified some root activities (roots nourishing the tree) e.g. support for A levels or for Higher Education in Further Education, catch up sessions and information for study skills. One tip was to watch for things which were not working and move in to show how the library could make an improvement.

Also Grazyna talked about tracking performance of students who had information and study skills education, not just while they were at the college, but also after they went on to university via direct entry (they found that their students were doing better than the students who had started at the university at level 1). This information was powerful to feed backto the teachers. She talked about some other initiatives where you could get evidence about impact including the "Six book challenge". Evidence included the testimony of students themselves e.g. a student saying "It made me realise I shouldn't use Wikipdia so much."

The USA's National Forum on Information Literacy (NFIL) is "conducting an informal survey to see how many of America's 3000+ 2-4 yr college and university libraries are involved in the following:
1) actively engaged in IL programmatic collaborations with on-campus and/or off campus pre-college, remediation, and/or undergraduate retention programs and
2) have on-going collaborations with community-based organizations such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA, Year-Up, etc. Also please identify the type of engagement i.e., weekly involvement, orientation sessions, integrated in First Year Experience curriculum, etc."
NFIL president Dr. Lana W. Jackman asks that if you are in the USA and have anything to share, then to send your response to nfil@infolit.org They will "summarize the results and post insightful comments anonymously on our website by the end of the summer."
Photo by Sheila Webber: young beech leaves, Lund, May 2013

The 2nd UK Information Literacy and Summon Day will be held on 25 July 2013 at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK. It is self-evidently for people who use the Summon discovery system at their library. "Whether you’re about to implement Summon, have just done so, or are an old hand at this sort of thing, you’ll have thought about how using web-scale discovery impacts on your information literacy teaching. Have you hardly changed your approach or have you had a radical rethink?" http://summonil2013.wordpress.com/ and the blog from last year's event is here http://summonil2012.wordpress.com/

There is a special issue of Library Trends (Volume 61, Number 3, Winter 2013: a priced publication) on the theme of Research Into Practice, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Information School (iSchool) at the University of Sheffield. This is my department, so I'm mentioning it even though it isn't focusing on information literacy.
- Putting Research into Practice: An Exploration of Sheffield iSchool Approaches to Connecting Research with Practice by Angharad Roberts, Andrew D. Madden, Sheila Corrall
- Community Resilience and the Role of the Public Library by Dan Grace, Barbara Sen
- No More Controversial than a Gardening Display?: Provision of LGBT-Related Fiction to Children and Young People in U.K. Public Libraries by Elizabeth L. Chapman
- Mind the Gap: Do Librarians Understand Service User Perspectives on Bibliotherapy? by Liz Brewster, Barbara Sen, Andrew Cox
- Collection Growth in Postwar America: A Critique of Policy and Practice by David E. Jones
- Provision of Distance Learner Support Services at U.K. Universities: Identification of Best Practice and Institutional Case Study by Charlotte Brooke, Pamela McKinney, Angie Donoghue
- Bibliometrics and Research Data Management Services: Emerging Trends in Library Support for Research by Sheila Corrall, Mary Anne Kennan, Waseem Afzal
- On Your Own but Not Alone: One-Person Librarians in Ireland and Their Perceptions of Continuing Professional Development by Eva Hornung
- Knowledge Management through the Lens of Library and Information Science: A Study of Job Advertisements by Ray Harper
- Getting Research into Policy and Practice: A Review of the Work of Bob Usherwood by Sheila Corrall
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/toc/lib.61.3.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry blossom fringes the path, May 2013, Lund

Registration for the 2nd Annual (on August 9 2013) Indiana University Libraries Information Literacy Colloquium is now open. It takes place in New Albany, Indiana, USA. This year’s conference theme is Shaping Student Success: The Role of Academic Libraries in High Impact Educational Practices. The full program and additional information about the event is available at http://libguides.ius.edu/colloquium and online registration is at https://indianauniv.ungerboeck.com/prod/emc00/register.aspx?OrgCode=10&EvtID=5724&AppCode=REG
Photo by Sheila Webber: crowd of peregrine watchers (see last post) after an interesting talk about the birds, held in the building they are nesting on. Sheffield, June 2013.

A couple of new open-access articles:
- Meyer N, and Bradley, d. (2013) "Collaboratively Teaching Intellectual Freedom to Education Students" Education Libraries, 36 (1) http://education.sla.org/?page_id=727 (includes links to material they used with the students)
- Sar, R. and Al–Saggaf, Y. (2013) "Propagation of unintentionally shared information and online tracking" First Monday, 18 (6). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4349/3681
A useful piece of research if you are stressing the ease with which we "leak" information about ourselves. "Various pieces of information are being shared online while users browse the Internet. Previous studies have demonstrated that as social networking sites (SNS) became popular, the information being leaked or shared is becoming more personal (including names and e-mail addresses). Users’ information is being shared or leaked from visited sites (both SNS and non-SNS) to third party sites (such as advertisers) in a number of ways including via the HTTP header. The intent of this study is identify the privacy implications of browsing the Internet within a single browsing session of a group of commonly visited sites (both SNS and non-SNS) doing activities common among most online users. We analysed the HTTP headers resulting from the first author’s browsing and reported on the types of information being shared or leaked, and to whom. We observed that within just a single browsing session of some sites, both the user’s identifiable and non-identifiable information are being leaked to various third party sites and also propagated to more than just one level of third party site. We also found that some SNS are also able to track user’s browsing activities not only within the SNS but also beyond it -particularly among web sites that use SNS widgets."
- Also I can't remember whether I said that ALISS Quarterly (a journal with short articles, aimed at librarians in the social sciences) makes its issues open access after a year, so the January 2012 issue on New Developments Library Orientation/ Information Literacy is now open: http://alissnet.org.uk/aliss-quarterly/aliss-quarterly-past-issues/
Photo from the University of Sheffield webcam that is following the progress of a nesting pair of peregrine falcons, on the building (a converted church) next to my department. They had 3 chicks, which are growing at an enormous rate - they were tiny balls of white fluff a couple of weeks ago. The live webcam is at http://efm.dept.shef.ac.uk/peregrine/ and they are likely to fly the nest in about 10 days. Two of the chicks are tucked at the side of the nest box in this picture. The "disturbing images" mentioned on the webcam page are when they get fed bits of (mostly) pigeon.

As usual, it looks like there were interesting sessions at the WILU conference that took place last month in Fredericton, Canada. The presentations are up online already. Just a few that caught my eye:
- “You must come see my daughter’s pet deer”: Cultural immersion for effective offshore distance learner support by Marc Bragdon (Distance Education Librarian, University of New Brunswick) (Talks about how Marc changed his approach to that of an embedded librarian in a distance learning course offered to students in Trinidad and Tobago, after actually visiting the country and interviewing students)
- Literacies — Information and beyond: The Learning Commons and the embedding of academic literacy instruction in disciplinary courses by Sophie Bury (Business Librarian and Head, Peter. F. Bronfman Business Library, York University), Ron Sheese (University Professor, York University), Rebecca Katz (Graduate Student, Boston University)
- Lesson Study: Creating a Synchronized Approach to Information Literacy Instruction by Eric Jennings (Assistant Professor, Instruction and Outreach Librarian, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire) (talks about an approach to teaching IL in a nursing curriculum)
Go to http://lib.unb.ca/WILU/session-abstracts/
Photo by Sheila Webber: apple blossom in Lund Botanic Gardens, May 2013

Sheffield University's Information School (i.e. my department!) has organised iFutures, a one-day conference on Thursday 25 July in Sheffield, UK, to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Information School. Run by and for doctoral students in the Information Science community, and based on the theme of The Next 50 Years the aim is to create an event for IS researchers and practitioners of the future to explore the potential impact of our research, and determine how we can help shape our discipline, both in academia and beyond.
The call for papers is open, with abstracts to be submitted by the deadline of 16 June 2013.  
Submissions are welcomed from doctoral researchers working in any area of information science or in related fields, including information retrieval, knowledge management, informatics or library and information studies. It doesn't matter whether you are studying part-time or full-time, or where you are based, do consider participating. There are several options for presentation format (Paper, Poster, and Pecha Kucha) and a prize of £100 in Amazon vouchers for the best submission in each category.
Diane Sonnenwald, Chair of Information and Library Studies at the School of Information and Library Studies at UCD, Dublin, and Vanessa Murdock, Principal Applied Researcher at Bing (Microsoft) will give keynotes.
More information on the website at http://ifutures.group.shef.ac.uk; the twitter account is @ifutures2013 and hashtag is #ifutures2013

This is a presentation being made tomorrow by Bill Johnston at Dundee University, looking at the place of information literacy within the "digital" university. It continues on from the framework proposed by him and Sheila MacNeill initially at http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sheilamacneill/2012/01/26/a-converstaion-around-what-it-means-to-be-a-digital-university/

When: Wednesday 29 May noon SL time (this is the same as US Pacific time, and is 8pm UK time), see http://tinyurl.com/nsyjruw for times elsewhere

Where: Infolit iSchool, in the virtual world Second Life, http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/132/239/22 You need a Second Life avatar and the SL browser installed on your computer

What: I (Sheila Yoshikawa in SL) will lead a one-hour discussion about Barbara Fister's stimulating keynote paper, presented at the LOEX (information
literacy) conference earlier this month. What do you think about her ideas? Everyone welcome.
Fister, B. (2013) Decode academy. Paper presented at LOEX, 3 May 2013. http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/loex13.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: our last SL meeting, in April 2013

The London Libraries Learning Research Reading Group is next meeting on 5th June - this is a face to face meeting (not virtual ;-) at the LSE in London, UK. They will be discussing Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment. More info at http://lllrrg.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/june-meeting/