Nazlin Bhimani is the Research Support & Special Collections Librarian at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE). She blogs here about the importance of teaching information literacy skills in academic libraries. 

Learning in most academic institutions relies on the provision of library resources to both support and supplement what is being taught and researched.  With the rapidly changing information landscape and the myriad ways in which users can search for information, the challenge of locating, accessing and finding relevant and appropriate information resources for academic research is ever present. 

Library users require skills that include knowledge of different types of information resources and an understanding of the most appropriate ways of critically evaluating information, using it in an ethical manner and managing this information.  

‘Information literacy’, as these information and literature search skills are referred to, go hand-in-hand with digital literacies, which allow users to make the best use of the technologies employed by information providers.  These literacies, in turn, form the gamut of academic literacies that ensure that learners leave formal education with the appropriate skills to enable them survive in the work place and to continue their learning throughout life.

What is information literacy?

The Alexandria Proclamation (UNESCO-IFLA, 2005) states:

Information literacy lies at the core of lifelong learning. It empowers people in all walks of life to see, evaluate, use and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals. It is a basic human right in a digital world and promotes social inclusion of all nations.

Information literacy therefore not only comprises “the competences to recognize information needs and to locate, evaluate, apply and create information within cultural and social contexts,” but it also includes within it elements of democracy and social justice.

Why do we teach information literacy?

The IOE Doctoral School is the largest in the UK, with over a third of its students from abroad.  These students undertake research degrees leading to an MPhil or PhD, EdD (Doctor of Education), DEdPsy (Doctor of Education Psychology) or an MRes (Master of Research). 

Many are mature students, usually professionals working in education at leadership level in their organisations:  they could be heads in schools, university lecturers, administrative managers and /or policy advisors in educational institutions, and even ministers of education in their countries.

This provides an invaluable opportunity to help organisations and educational leaders understand the value of libraries and the role of librarians, particularly in our rapidly changing information world.

We are also able to play an advocacy role so that these future educators can influence their organisations both in terms of ensuring equal access to information and ensuring information workers are there to curate, manage, preserve and make accessible information for their communities’ social progress.

Teaching students these skills is as important today as it has been in the past. However today, users not only need to know how to access large print and digital collections in varied formats but they also need to understand the rights associated with the content in order to use the information appropriately and disseminate their work in an ethical manner.

How do we provide information literacy training?

A team of six members of staff at the Institute's Newsam Library and Archives work to provide information literacy training to staff, students and visiting scholars.

Our aim is to ensure that information literacy training is delivered to as many students as possible in ways that make an impact both in terms of the positive outcomes in their studies and in terms of their understanding the complexity of the information world today.

The team produces material to support information literacy, in the form of leaflets and specially written web pages in LibGuides.
Sessions are provided as part of induction programmes, as lunchtime drop-ins, as one-to-one sessions and as a compulsory module in the case of the Doctoral School. 

The following describes the compulsory information literacy module:

1.Traditional and digital literacies

As I go through the compulsory module, which is offered, both face-to-face and online for the students on the Online PhD programme, I introduce all the traditional elements of an information literacy course, embedding digital literacies as they are required.  

Students are shown how to navigate various library catalogues and databases in order to search and find information and critically evaluate resources relevant for their literature reviews.  In doing this, students learn about search strategies and the need to define concepts and keywords. 

They are tasked to create concept maps that link the main themes contained in their research question and may go as far as linking the key readings they have found by theme. The readings highlight different aspects of the research process for the literature review, which in turn, encourage discussion.

Students are introduced to different types of resources, including historical materials in archives and special collections, policy documents, audio-visual content and data.  They look at ways in which impact is measured using citation counts and alternative metrics such as mentions on the social web.This is our most in-depth course, but many of the skills and resources are introduced in sessions provided for other parts of the Institute.

2. How new technologies can help

Many of the students have been away from formal education for some time, but are quickly made aware of how new technologies can make their lives easier.

Students are introduced to ways they can keep current with research by using TOCs and alerting services and RSS; and they are introduced to referencing software such as such as Zotero and Mendeley.

Students are encouraged to reflect on their readings by creating a blog and writing about their research. This allows them to build confidence, keep a track of their ideas, get feedback through comments and establish their digital identities. 

Our digital researcher guide is used to introduce students to social media sites such as Twitter both for research and to consider ways in which they can share, network and even crowd source for information.

3. How research is disseminated

A considerable amount of time is given to discussing how research is disseminated, both traditionally and as open access. Examples of open educational resources including the IOE’s home-grown Digital Education Resource Archive, DERA and its research repository IOEePrints, the Doctoral School’s open access journal Educate ~, the IOE’s London Review of Education, JORUM and other open access content such asDOAJ and OpenDOAR are given as examples of the trend towards quality knowledge becoming freely and openly accessible globally. 

The merits of open access, both from the perspective of enabling their own work to be found and cited, and from the perspective of creating a more equal knowledge society, are not lost on many of our international students.  They too recognise this as social justice.  

The students are especially pleased to then have the library guides and demos available to them as a YouTube playlist so that they can come back to the course at any particular time of need.

In this way I can be sure that students not only to acquire the necessary skills to navigate the information landscape for research, but change perceptions – of libraries, the role of librarians and value of information literacy in the Information Age.

By using and spreading their knowledge we hope our students will open the door of information privilege to others.

About the UCL Institute of Education (IOE)

The IOE provides training and consultation to governments, international and national agencies, charities and the private sector and has over 7000 students from 111 different countries. It also trains 1500 new teachers every year.

@IOELibrary, @IOE_London and @NazlinBhimani

An adaptation of this article can be found on the Newsam Library blog: Social Justice: Information Literacy Training at UCL’s Institute of Education

Image source: "Institute of Education" by Philip James, used under CC BY 2.0 / Original cropped and resized