Trying to implement an information literacy strategy without reference to it in related policy areas is doomed to failure, say John Crawford and Christine Irving. So when the Scottish Executive proved ignorant of how policy needs to join up, campaigners adopted a novel approach to advocacy.
To be effective, an information literacy policy must be firmly pegged to the information, lifelong learning, inclusion and digital policies of the state.
In their Six Frames for Information Literacy Education1 Christine Bruce and colleagues explore the impact of IL on society, and identify issues surrounding the digital divide. In a recent interview, Christine Bruce identified five priorities over the next five years.
‘We need a lot more lobbying on the importance of IL on the political front, with industry, with very senior people. We need money to flow to the IL agenda….People need to concentrate on finding out who we should lobby and who should do the lobbying. We need people with political and marketing skills.’2
Advocacy for IL is new
There are many international declarations and national strategies, notably the Prague Declaration, Towards an Information Literate Society.3 This sets out basic principles of IL as a key to the social, cultural and economic development of nations, communities, institutions and individuals. Recently, the Alexandria High-Level Colloquium (2005) reinforced this. It supports political lobbying and urges ‘governments and intergovernmental organisations to pursue policies and programmes to promote IL and lifelong learning’.4
Despite UK policy statements, Britain lags behind the US and Australia in implementing IL policies. The Australian Library and Information Association has produced an IL Forum Advocacy Toolkit,5 based on an American Library Association original. Advocacy toolkits have their uses, but sometimes well-intentioned generalisation about the social value of libraries is not enough.
The need for advocacy in Scotland emerged out of a research project.6 Initially, ‘Information literacy: the link between secondary and tertiary education project’ set out to develop an IL framework linking the secondary and tertiary sectors.
In the course of research, other themes soon emerged, notably, the role of information in the workplace and the need for work-based learning and advocacy. It became clear that funding and educational bodies in Scotland were acting on policies emanating from the Scottish Executive, which failed to recognise the importance of IL and so had not identified it in the school curriculum. If progress was to be made, it would be necessary to influence Scottish government policy making.
The Scottish Parliament has a petitions mechanism, which allows any Scottish citizen to raise issues which they consider important and of potential importance to the Scottish Executive. The system has few international comparators. The Bundestag in Germany has copied the Scottish system but it is not known if any German librarians have made use of it.7 In Scotland the petition can be submitted electronically or on paper. It was suggested by Chris Milne (University of Abertay) that this system seemed to offer a way forward.
Further investigation revealed that, before a citizen can petition the Scottish Parliament, the issue has to be raised with the Scottish Executive department concerned, or the citizens’ MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament).
After consulting the Scottish Parliament’s very helpful Scottish Parliament civil servants, the appeal was launched as:
‘Petition by Dr John Crawford calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Executive to ensure that the national school curriculum recognises the importance of information literacy as a key lifelong learning skill.’8
The ground for the petition had been prepared carefully. A short presentation was given to the CILIP Lifelong Learning Panel on 15 November 2005. The panel received the petition idea enthusiastically and gave it their unanimous support. Subsequently, the Council of CILIP in Scotland agreed to support ‘the principles behind the petition and urged members to support it’. Messages requesting support for the petition, along with the URL, were posted on lis-link, lis-CILIP, lis-info literacy and other library lists. The message was also passed to educational lists and contacts.
In late October 2005 the petition was posted as an e-petition on the Parliament website and attracted 710 signatures in total (about twice the average figure), as a direct result of the electronic lobbying; 415 were from Scotland, 186 from England, 31 from Wales and the rest from other parts of the world including Canada, the US and Australia. Signatories included some leading figures in the worldwide IL movement.
Petition considered
The Petitions Committee met on 21 December 2005 to consider the petition.9 John made a short opening presentation, in which he drew attention to the international interest in the petition. Then he, Chris Milne and Christine answered questions for about half an hour.
After listening to the evidence the committee decided to seek comments from the following organisations: the Scottish Executive, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMIe) and Learning & Teaching Scotland (LTS) plus the relevant trade unions in the teaching profession and the overarching university body (Universities Scotland). The Unison section for school librarians, the School Library Association in Scotland (SLA Scotland) and the Scottish Further Education Unit also expressed interesting in responding to the consultation. The Petitions Committee met again on 31 May 2006 to review the responses, which were passed to the petitioners for further comment.
Responses from NGOs
Most responses were favourable but it is clear that the need to identify IL as a separate issue in the curriculum is not universally recognised.10 The most unsympathetic response was from the Educational Institute of Scotland. This contained factual inaccuracies and incorrect assumptions about our work. The Scottish Executive Education Department merely reiterated existing policy and the SQA took a similar line.
Much more supportive was the response from HMIe, which has led to direct contact with a sympathetic HMI. Strong support also came from LTS, Universities Scotland, the SLA Scotland and Unison School Librarians.
We were given the opportunity to comment on the responses, and these further comments were submitted in August. Sympathetic bodies also submitted further evidence, including the SLA Scotland and the US National Forum on IL whose activists had heard about our work and wrote to the Petitions Committee adding their support. Their international/worldwide perspective was particularly welcome.
The Petitions Committee met again on 15 November 2006 and agreed, given the basis of responses received from the NGOs, to close consideration of the petition. A committee member, Helen Eadie MSP, commented, rather inaccurately, that all the responses seemed to support the petitioner and that ‘the petitioner was pushing at an open door’. Her assessment may have been prompted by the belief that the Curriculum for Excellence offers adequate support for IL, which is certainly not the case.11
The experience with the petition highlighted the need for advocacy to encourage policy making at a national level, and the project submitted evidence to the Scottish Executive Digital Inclusion Consultation in January 2006. This emphasised that although the digital inclusion document12 dwelt at length on skills, IL was conspicuously absent. It was also felt that the consultation document showed insufficient awareness of current research in this area. The authors contributed evidence to the review13 but the outcome for IL was unfortunately disappointing.
The petitions system has recently been the subject of an impartial study by Dr Christopher Carman of the Department of Politics at Glasgow University.14 The study is broadly supportive of the process, describing the amount of information about the petitions presented as ‘unprecedented’. Perhaps not surprisingly petitioners are middle-aged and middle-class with more than half (58 per cent) having a university degree; 82 per cent thought the petitions system was easy to understand, and 55 per cent thought it brings the Parliament closer to the people of Scotland; 63 per cent thought their petition had been handled fairly but only 30 per cent thought their petition had been a success, with 55 per cent being dissatisfied with the outcome.
To some extent our experience reflects this. We found members of the Petitions Committee were well informed. They had clearly read the documentation. They asked thoughtful and constructively critical questions and then decided to seek the views of key NGOs. While such bodies can choose to ignore us, they have to pay a great deal of attention to the Petitions Committee and we can use the majority of favourable responses as ammunition for future advocacy. We would have been extremely naïve to expect a wholesale change in Scottish Executive education policy as a result.
The fact there was no media coverage of the petition shows all too clearly the difficulties of advocacy for library and information services. When the petition was on the Scottish Parliament website John wrote to the Herald and the Scotsman urging public support of the petition. Neither printed the letter despite the fact that both newspapers pride themselves on their coverage of educational policy issues. The session of the Petitions Committee at which we spoke was extensively reported in the Scottish press but only one of the three petitions presented was covered – on the subject of breast cancer screening.
The petition had a slightly unexpected result, as the research project came to the attention of Ofcom Scotland and we both now attend its consultation meetings, where media literacy, which sounds suspiciously similar to IL, is emerging as a key issue.
The petition and the response to the digital inclusion policy document show that advocacy has to target digital inclusion, lifelong learning and telecommunications policy as well as the more familiar library and information areas. This is particularly true of home nations, which must constantly target their governments on these issues. Advocacy is still too concentrated within the information world and not the wider community.
References
1 Christine Bruce et al. ‘Six Frames for Information Literacy: a conceptual framework for interpreting the relationships between theory and practice.’ Italics, 5 (1), January 2006, pp. 1-18. (www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/paperscall.htm).
2 Angela Newton and Debbie Boden. ‘Information literacy development in Australia.’ Library + Information Update, 5(1-2), 2006. pp. 42-43.
3 The Prague Declaration: Towards an Information Literate Society 2003 (www.infolit.org/International_Conference/
PragueDeclaration.pdf)
4 Sarah Devotion Garner. High-level Colloquium on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning. Report of the meeting in Bibliotheca Alexandrina November 2005. 2006. (www.ifla.org/III/wsis/High-Level-Colloquium.pdf).
5 A Library Advocate’s Guide to Building Information Literate Communities: IL Forum Advocacy Toolkit, Australian Library and Information Association, 2003 (www.alia.org.au/advocacy/literacy.kit.pdf).
6 John Crawford and Christine Irving. ‘Information literacy: the link between secondary and tertiary education project and its wider implications.’ Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 2007, forthcoming.
7 The Herald, 13 November 2006.
8 John Crawford and Christine Irving. Petition to the Scottish Parliament. 2006 (www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/petition_further.html).
9 Scottish Parliament. Public Petitions Committee. Public Petitions Committee Official Report 21 December 2005. (www.scottish.parliament.uk/business
/committees/petitions/or-05/pu05-1902.htm).
10 www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/petition_further.html
11 Public Petitions Committee Official Report 15 November 2006. (www.scottish.parliament.uk/business
/committees/petitions/or-06/pu06-1802.htm#Col2901).
12 Review of Scottish Digital Inclusion Policy. Scottish Executive, 2005 (www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005
/11/04103500/35010 ).
13 Introduction to Digital Inclusion. Scottish Executive, 2006 (www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Government
/Open-scotland/17820/10759).
14 Christopher J. Carman. The Assessment of the Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions System 1999 – 2006. Public Petitions Committee Report, SP Paper 654 (www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees
/petitions/reports-06/pur06-PPS-assessment-01.htm).
Dr John Crawford (jcr@gcal.ac.uk) is Library Research Officer, and Christine Irving (christine.irving@gcal.ac.uk) is Research Assistant/Project Officer, Glasgow Caledonian University.
Updated: 20 February 2007