I went to the joint workshop on information literacy for health organised jointly by the Library and Knowledge Development Network (LKDN), the Society of National and University Libraries (SCONUL) and the University Medical School Librarians Group (UMSLG).
The presentations are going up on one of these web sites, so I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow account and the programme is on the SCONUL site, if you want to see who spoke. There was probably bias towards the NHS in the presentations and not enough from higher education.
But some thoughts occurred to me during the day:
We skated over defining information literacy and deciding what the right names for this thing might be (do we call the first element information or knowledge, are we discussing literacy or a broader ability to manage information or knowledge and so on). This is by no means straightforward and while I can see why the organisers wanted a meeting that made plans rather than debating definitions, it's still important.
The part CILIP might play was discussed, as well as the last CILIP council’s controversial decision not to approve a Special Interest Group for information literacy.
Someone asked if the European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) was a model. Clearly it isn’t in terms of content, as it ‘s very ICT based, and whether its structural approach works or not seems to me moot.
When we broke into groups I acted as rapporteur for the red group, who were asked to come up with some smart (specific measurable achievable, etc) proposals for action to be taken in the wake of the workshop. Our group was asked to think about information literacy for health care workers themselves. We decided to concentrate on recognition of information literacy, implementing information literacy programmes and how to make sure skills were maintained.
It was difficult to make our actions fully "smart" but we came up with the following:
Develop an agreed and broad definition of information literacy and achieve agreement on a national standard
Share good practice (one of the platitudinous statements that come out of such events and someone was heard to say that it might be more fun to share bad practice). But what we had in mind by this was twofold: to share good examples of information literacy programmes that work (we were all very impressed by a joint Portsmouth and Southampton initiative that was the subject of one of the morning presentations) through the websites of the sponsoring organisations; we felt also that information literacy needed important people from the healthcare professions themselves, Royal Colleges and so on, to come forward and involve themselves in promoting it to their fellow doctors, nurses, midwives, etc.
We felt that CILIP should be persuaded into action on these matters, through approaches to elected council members, CILIP staff, and so on.
Connectivity and infrastructure still seem difficult, and one suggestion was that LKDN and the NHS Information Authority should give an up-to-date position statement.
There was considerable frustration about the lack of seamlessness in access to resources, particularly between higher education and the NHS. Members of the group thought this was a great obstacle to teaching information literacy effectively. I think it is hard to see what practically might be done.
In the report back from other groups (which is being collated and will appear on a website, though quite where I don't know), one sensible point from another group struck me, that there should be some attempt to establish an evidence base of what's effective in information literacy teaching.
And an afterthought, which occurred to me on the train: it's difficult to find out what other institutions do. In higher education much of the material for this sort of work hides behind password-protected electronic learning environments, while much NHS material must lurk behind NHSNET. Might it be useful to bring examples of well-designed materials used for information literacy teaching into a central open place (dare I call it a library?) where it could be seen, admired and learnt from?
Finally it's odd how librarians, who one might expect to have some concern for language, can mangle English quite so much. Some phrases I noted down: "bolted and embedded multi-pathways", "built-in competencies embedded in training pathways". When I was at school an English teacher kept a list of plague words, words which he would not accept in essays. They included "nice", "rather" and others I forget. It might be useful for all librarians to agree not to use the words "embedded", "engage" and "robust" for a year, and see if it is possible (as it must be) to carry on discussion with one another without these meaningless vogue words
