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Volume 6 Issue 1
March 2013
Conul Information Literacy Seminar
Consortium of National and University Libraries
C
ONUL, the Consortium of
National and University Libraries,
held its annual information
literacy seminar on Tuesday, June 11th
in the Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity
College Dublin.
The introductory speaker, Dr Noel
O’Connor, Director of Studies at DIT,
discussed the role of engagement and the
student experience. Through a variety of
different studies he classified engagement
as that “representing both the time and
energy that students in educationally
purposeful activities” which directly
influenced student expectations and
perceptions, challenges and workloads.
To further emphasise its role, he stressed
that “engagement has to be an institutionwide commitment, not confined to
individual academics or projects. It has to
embrace teaching as well as research,
students as well as academics and a full
range of support services. The engaged
university, he stressed, was a public
engagement with research, was based on
knowledge exchange and sharing with a
social responsibility to maximise the
benefits that an institution can generate
for the public. The development of a
student engagement strategy, students
creating connections through the
development of cross-disciplinary project
work, in undergraduate and postgraduate
education. This enthusiastic presentation
was followed by a series of Pecha
Kucha presentations (pronounced petca
kutca). This style of twenty slides for
twenty seconds, allows the professional or
student to speak briefly on their research
or topic. Topics in this format included:
• Librarians as personal tutors
• Designing and delivering information
literacy programmes to second level
students
• Impact of information literacy
instruction
The concept of information l iteracy was
followed through presentations from
other speakers including Jo Parker of the
Open University, who introduced the
audience to the development of a digital
information literacy framework.
Mary Antonesa, shared the results of the
ACIL Information Literacy Survey 2012.
Miriam Fitzpatrick, lecturer in
architecture in UCD and WIT, opened the
afternoon session with an illustrative piece
on the role of academic writing in the
undergraduate setting. It was followed
by further Pecha Kucha presentations on:
•
M. Phil. on digital humanities and culture, a personal perspective by Ellen
O’Flaherty, archivist at TCD.
•
Information literacy behaviour of
humanities PhD students by Ronan
Madden, UCD.
•
On funding information learning
online for law students by Sara-Anne
Kennedy, DIT.
Hugo Kelly from NUI Galway discussed
the role of information literacy in legal
learning and practice and the need to
develop and adapt collections for clinical
practice and as teaching and research
tools.
Our own HSLG member Michelle
Dalton from University Hospital
Limerick, discussed their work in UHL,
the Sconul Project and its four pillars of
information literacy. Following surveying
and semi-structured interviewing with
clinicians and nurses, it was apparent that
clinicians needed strong information
literacy skills and digital skills to access a
wide range of resources. Four key themes
emerged.
The final speaker, Lisa Callaghan of
DCU, presented evidence of changes to
their annual training programmes and a
move away from the structured database
open days, which they had run for ten
years. The redesign of the programme,
its rebranding and use of online forums
for communication training gave the
library a better opportunity to market
its own skills and staff expertise.
Anne M. O’Byrne