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Dal Libraries Launches Refreshed Website w. MLIS Student Assistance

On July 5th, Dalhousie Libraries launched a revamped website, featuring a more streamlined look, and added several navigation widgets and features to help improve user experience. MLIS graduates Emily Colford and Charlotte MacKeigan assisted with usability research, redesign/layout and many other tasks related to this site revamp.

We applaud Dalhousie Libraries and our MLIS students for their hard work on this initiative. User experience is an extremely important consideration when designing (or redesigning) any information system, and we are sure this will help the Dalhousie community navigate their library services much more quickly and easily.

Read the full synopsis of the website project here and visit the revised site here.

Dal Libraries

MLIS Alumna, Sara Gillis, Awarded the CLA Alan MacDonald Mentorship Award

Sara Gillis (MLIS ’94) is the 2016 recipient of the Canadian Library Association (CLA) Alan MacDonald Mentorship Award. This award “recognizes individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to mentoring activities either within their workplace or in an association and is generously sponsored by EBSCO/ YPB.”

Sara has mentored many of our students over the years in her capaciy as Community Engagement Manager at Halifax Public Libraries. She also currently moderates the CLA Community-Led Library Service Network.

This award is named after Alan MacDonald, who was a natural mentor in the libraries field, and will be presented at the opening ceremonies of the CLA National Forum on June 1st.

Congratulations Sara, from everyone here at SIM!

Full announcement here. 

Community-led Services: A Partnership between Dalhousie University, Shelter Nova Scotia, and Halifax Public Libraries

A reading course project by MLIS students, Jenna Knorr & Elizabeth O’Brien

“A basic goal of library service is that it be designed to meet the needs and interests of users. For any information organization to function effectively and usefully, there must be a match between the services offered and the needs of the users themselves. A community development approach, as applied in the Community-Led Library Service Model, provides this comprehensive foundation in the philosophy, challenges, and practical application of inclusive library and information services, with particular attention to the needs of socially excluded community members.” – INFO 6500 Community-Led Services, course description

Jenna & Elizabeth presenting their findings at SIM Research Day (APril 7th, 2016)

Jenna & Elizabeth presenting their findings at SIM Research Day (04/07/16)

The community-led approach to outreach is an emerging model being adopted by Canadian library systems. For public libraries especially, this service model can help libraries to become even more inclusive and welcoming for patrons of all kinds. By accommodating for the needs of all library users and adapting programming, collections, and more to the communities in which public libraries operate, the public library can continue to re-assert itself as a relevant and essential resource.

This project with Shelter Nova Scotia and Halifax Public Libraries (HPL) was conducted as part of a graduate-level reading course called Community-Led Services at Dalhousie University. Jenna Knorr and Elizabeth O’Brien, MLIS students in the School of Information Management (SIM), conducted the course under the supervision of SIM professor Dr. Vivian Howard. Our contact at HPL was Sara Gillis, Community Engagement Manager, and our contact at Shelter Nova Scotia was Colleen Ritchie, Communications & Fund Development Specialist.

We took this course, which was still in development at the time, to gain both theoretical and practical experience in the Community-Led Library Service Model. This involved familiarizing ourselves with the philosophy, rationale, concepts, and practices that form the foundation of inclusive, community-led service. We did this through an in-depth literature review, as well as through working with HPL and Shelter NS on a project to determine how Shelter NS’s clients use, or don’t use, the public library in Halifax, and how the library can better serve them.

Colleen and Sara met initially in the fall of 2015 to discuss a partnership between Shelter NS and HPL. A few days later, we approached Sara to discuss this course and ways that we could work with HPL on a community engagement project. It was meant to be!

Early days

Our first step in defining the needs of Shelter Nova Scotia was to meet with Colleen to create an asset map outlining their existing resources and concerns with regard to how the clients of Shelter Nova Scotia use – or possibly, don’t use – the public libraries in Halifax. We wanted to identify any barriers that patrons may experience when using the library in order to inform HPL of any restrictive policies or practices that they may currently have in place. Through this conversation, it was determined that our best means of data collection would be to conduct paper surveys with the clients of Shelter NS. Colleen helped us to determine the best way to do this, and at her recommendation, we decided to host programs in two of Shelter Nova Scotia’s locations, Barry House and Herring Cove Apartments.

Early in the semester, we also completed critical literature reviews. The reading lists for these reviews came from Dr. Howard’s proposed reading list for this course, which will be offered at SIM in Winter 2017. Through these literature reviews, we learned a lot about the theory behind the community-led service model, and also what other library systems are doing to adopt this service model across Canada. We were also able to make recommendations to Dr. Howard on more appropriate resources to add to the reading list, as well as any other additional articles, videos, or webinars that we thought would be worthy of inclusion.

NSPIRG funding

We applied for funding from the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group (NSPIRG) in January 2016. NSPIRG is a student-funded organization at Dalhousie University that provides funding for original research on social and environmental issues that address inequalities, promote awareness, and foster social change. On February 5, 2016, we received $400 from NSPIRG and a few weeks later on February 24, 2016, we received an additional $50. The funding allowed us to cover all of the costs associated with our project, enabling us to provide food at our events and to pay honorariums to the authors who did readings.

Ethics application

Because the project was being conducted as part of a SIM course, we had to submit an ethics application to the Faculty of Management Research Ethics Board outlining the scope, goals, and methods of the project. The application allowed us to plan the project in advance, including what the events would look like, as well as the survey questions we would ask.

Shelter Nova Scotia events

Colleen reached out to the House Directors, who were all accommodating and interested in the project. We met with Kate Billo from Barry House and Nicole Nearing at the Herring Cove Apartments, since we felt the clients in these two houses could offer different perspectives on the library, due to the demographics of the houses, as well as their different geographical locations within Halifax.

Barry House is an emergency shelter for women and children, with room for 20 people and an average of 17 clients a night. The house is located in the North End, close to the Halifax North Memorial Branch of HPL. Herring Cove Apartments is the newest Shelter NS facility, located just outside of the peninsula, close to the Captain William Spry Library. It is a small apartment building, currently with eight residents but with room for up to 12, that offers independent living facilities for men.

Both events were held in the early evening and were structured in similar ways. We started the program with lots of food and an introduction to our project, then we had an author do a short reading. Carol Bruneau joined us at Barry House and Steve Vernon came to the Herring Cove Apartments event. Both authors received a wonderful response and helped to make the events more relaxed and engaging. Following the readings, Sara and a staff member from the closest HPL branches – Matthew McCarthy, Manager of Halifax North Memorial, and Nick Hart, Library Assistant at Captain William Spry – chatted about the library and what programs and services are currently available. Sara also brought along card registration forms and we had two people sign up for cards! Finally, we dispersed the consent forms and surveys, chatting informally with the clients as questions and comments came up. Overall, the events went smoothly and were equal parts fun and informative, and with lots of delicious food!

Survey results

Our survey was distributed in paper format at each of the events. The survey consisted of a consent form and a paper questionnaire with six questions about public library use. Participants had the option to complete the survey on their own, or be guided through it with the assistance of an HPL staff member or Shelter NS staff member.

We had a total of 12 survey responses, out of a potential of 28 respondents – 43% of the target population. Eleven currently use the library. The most popular reasons were for computer use, books and information resources (both in the branch and to check out), relaxation, and movies. Others use the library as a spot for meeting others, reading the newspaper and doing the puzzles, attending programs, and using drugs.

Some of the reasons why the library is not being used include:

o “Transportation (I’m crippled/arthritis)”
o “Too busy. Caught up in the Shelter looking for a place. Will return once things are stable.”
o “No card”
o “When I have no drugs, I don’t use the library”

Lots of people are unaware of the services that the library currently offers; only four respondents answered that they were confident in knowing what libraries offer, while two said they were not aware, and 5 said they knew some but would like to learn more. This indicates an eagerness for respondents to be more involved in library programming and activities.

Recommendations

We made four recommendations to Shelter Nova Scotia and HPL. These recommendations came from our conversations with clients, as well Sara, Colleen, Kate, and Nicole.

  • Communication and Promotion
    • Generally, clients of Shelter NS still see the library as a place that offers primarily information resources, such as books, newspapers, and computers. In addition, staff members have had difficulties contacting an HPL staff person for issues relating to access to services for clients and have not been promoting the library and its other services to clients. Therefore, our first recommendation is to improve the communication between Shelter NS and HPL. This would be two-fold, with a direct contact person that Shelter NS can reach out to when issues and questions arise, but also for HPL to be able to contact Shelter NS in order to promote library services and events. This could be about what the library currently offers, such as updated programs for their local branch, or the different ways to use the library, obtain a card, attend events, and even ways that clients can request desired titles.
  • Programming
    • A number of survey respondents, when asked what the library could offer them in the future, brought up a desire for different support groups. These included support groups for men, women, parents and children, as well as mental health and addictions groups. Currently HPL has a wide range of programs, including mental health support including mindfulness and meditation in some locations, but only one client of Shelter NS that we surveyed has attended one. While this may be solved by better communication and promotion of events and services, Shelter NS and HPL could also work together to design programs that would be directly beneficial for the clients. It would be wonderful to see a collaborative partnership develop centred around offering these programs, and others as they arise.
  • Staff Training
    • While our survey results did not indicate that clients of Shelter NS were receiving poor treatment from staff at HPL, it is still a recommendation that staff complete further training that would be helpful when interacting with a wide range of community members. These include Mental Health First Aid, Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST), and Nonviolent Crisis Intervention. Currently, about 50% of HPL staff are trained in Nonviolent Crisis Intervention, as there are staff members who are able to provide this training. Ensuring that 100% of staff undergo this training and develop these skills would do wonders for interactions with a wide range of patrons in the library. Mental Health First Aid and ASIST would be wonderful assets to have as well. These courses would provide staff who interact with Shelter NS clients, as well as many other community members, better skills and resources that would work to make the libraries a more welcoming and supportive place for patrons experiencing mental health crises.
    • In addition to these courses, we also recommend that staff at HPL should be made aware of services and organizations in Halifax that could be useful to patrons such as emergency shelters, addiction services, food banks, and others. It is vital that staff know that these resources are not only available, but also their contact information, in order to pass this along to patrons who may ask for them.
  • Social Workers in the Library!
    • Many public libraries across North America, including the Edmonton Public Library and the Winnipeg Public Library, have social workers working within the library. It is our long-term recommendation and desire that Halifax Public Libraries join this group of socially-minded public libraries. Social workers within public libraries offer a wide range of services, including frontline support, connecting patrons with other services and organizations, and leading programs such as support groups or employment outreach. We believe that this would be a wonderful resource for not only clients of Shelter NS, but lots of other communities within Halifax.
Conclusion

This project enabled us to lay the foundation for an essential and emerging partnership between Shelter Nova Scotia and Halifax Public Libraries. Though the two organizations have coincided in Halifax for many years, there had been little in the way of collaboration between them. The recommendations that we made to Shelter Nova Scotia and HPL were received very well by both organizations, and we are confident that the conversation that we sparked between the two groups will continue, even now that our project has come to a close. We are eager to see everything that this partnership will bring in the future, but we are confident that it will mean positive change for the clients of Shelter Nova Scotia and improve their ability to access the public library.

Academic Support Series #7 – Academic & Public Library Work. Friday, March 11, 12-1:30pm

Please join me for the LAST Academic Support Series workshop of the 2015/2016 year! Community Librarian and SIM grad Amanda Fullerton will be joining Lindsay McNiff, for a discussion on employment issues and experiences in two types of libraries: public and academic. Although we’re meeting in Rowe 4001 for consistency, the session will be discussion-based rather than hands-on. See below for the full description:

Friday, March 11, 2016, 12-1:30pm in Rowe 4001

Is a career in public libraries calling your name? Not sure how to go about getting your foot in the door? Embarking on a career as a librarian can seem daunting, especially if you’ve never worked in a library before, but don’t fret, it is possible. All those years working in customer service may be more valuable than you imagined! Public libraries across Canada are shaking things up by sending librarians to work directly in their communities and these types of jobs require lots of skills beyond those required for traditional library work. Community Librarian Amanda Fullerton, will share her story of working in one of these unique and exciting library positions.

Using her OLA panel presentation as a springboard, Lindsay will discuss and answer questions regarding contract working in academic libraries, beginning with questions such as What’s the deal with contract work? Will I have to work a contract before I get a permanent job? What can I expect from a temporary contract? How can I make the most of contract work? What steps should I take as the contract winds down?

During this session, Amanda and Lindsay will speak to these issues, provide insight from our experiences, and talk openly about some of the realities of public and academic library work.

IM Public Lecture: Mark McCumber (New Brunswick Public Library Service)

The Information Management Public Lectures give attention to exciting advances in research and professional practice. The topics are diverse reflecting the importance and global extent of Information Management in today’s society. The lectures are open to all members of the Dalhousie campus and surrounding community. When feasible, recordings of the lectures are posted for wider circulation. For the full schedule, visit the Public Lecture page of our website.

Public Lecture 07_16_Mark McCumberChoosing Food: Exploring Consumers’ Use of Ingredient Information

Lecture Details
Thursday, February 25th, 2016 from 5:35-6:35pm
Room 3001, Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building, 6100 University Avenue

Abstract: Food labelling is designed to help consumers make better food choices. Understanding how this information is used becomes increasingly important as relationships between diet and diseases are recognized. Research on food label use has left the list of ingredients under-explored, despite its identification as an important component of the food label. As an internal cognitive process, information use during food choices is difficult to measure without influencing behaviour. This lecture will present the results of mixed-methods research designed to gain insight into cognitive and behavioural aspects of food choices. A survey measured self-reported nutrition behaviours of 518 university students. A screening tool identified surveyed volunteers likely to use ingredient information, 11 of which completed a simulated shopping task that produced rich qualitative data relating to food label information use. A theoretical approach to thematic analysis revealed that participants focused on avoidance of negatives when making food choices, employing various strategies to accomplish this goal.

Biography: Mark McCumber graduated from the MLIS program at Dalhousie in 2015. For a devoted vegetarian and conscious consumer who is eternally suspicious of our food production industries, it was the natural choice to incorporate some aspect of food security into his pursuit of the MLIS. Having become intrigued by the study of information seeking behaviour, he determined to combine this field with his natural interests, designing a study intended to explore how people use food label information when making food choices. Mark currently works for New Brunswick Public Library Services as the Public Services Librarian for the York Region. Residing in Fredericton, New Brunswick, he still reads every food label of products that he’s considering purchasing, as well as many that he is not, and is somewhat dissatisfied that he can only wear denim on Fridays and weekends.

NOTE: We encourage you to attend in person, but if that is not possible you can access an audio recording + slides on our website following the lecture (a notice will be sent when posted). Web streaming is not currently available. 

Reflections on Dr. Ingrid Parent’s Horrocks Lecture “Driving Influential Leadership in a Global Context in the Information Profession.”

By: Domenic Rosati (MLIS Candidate 2017)

Listen to a video/audio recording of the lecture here.

Horrocks 018This year’s Horrocks National Leadership lecture was given by Dr. Ingrid Parent, University of British Columbia’s University Librarian and past president of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). Dr. Parent’s lecture shared her insights about successful leadership within libraries. One of the key take away’s for me was that leadership in every sphere is always related to the values that we hold in common, such as (in the case of librarians and information professionals) access to and preservation of information.

Leadership in the community

Dr. Parent began by discussing one of the key issues that libraries and other memory institutions face: the democratization of access to information through technology. Before, libraries, archives, and museums could count on their roles as gatekeepers to the information and heritage universe. Now, individuals harness and expect instant access to information anytime, anywhere.

She asks us to think about how libraries and other memory institutions can deal with this through leadership in the community, using roles the library and information science community plays on a global level as an example.  First, she spoke about the efforts of setting international standards and policies for our profession, and that we are often unaware that standards and policies made on a global level effect our local practices.

Horrocks 021Dr. Parent illustrates this by telling us about her experiences with IFLA, specifically her involvement in an international intellectual property meeting. Her example spoke to the vital advocacy role that information professionals have in international discussions. As IFLA president, she had only three minutes to speak to the interests of our profession regarding fair copyright and intellectual property standards. Conversations she had with representatives of other professions were also important to continuing the borrowing and lending missions of libraries. Dr. Parent also spoke about her involvement with The Platform to Enhance the Sustainability of The Information Society Transglobally (PERSIST), and how she advised which resources and content were going to be selected for preservation.

Another value important to our profession is bringing the public together for a common cause. She gave two examples of successful library programming in two different cultural locations, Botswana and Brisbane, Australia, that demonstrated the value of access to resources and teamwork in very different contexts. Turning to her home institution, she spoke to how UBC has been able to apply some of those common values to support their aboriginal community, through truth and reconciliation initiatives, a free First Nations borrowing card, and partnerships to provide resources and spaces for indigenous communities for the digitization of heritage materials.

Horrocks 035Unfortunately, the contemporary scholarly publishing model, with its increasing subscription fees and electronic access limitations, is threatening long term access to research. She argues that, with our library consortiums, we can advocate for alternatives, such as open access, or for consortia sized purchases and negotiation power.

Leadership in the Profession

Dr. Parent then spoke about the challenges library and memory institutions face as a whole. Those in our profession have developed contemporary information seeking practices, from innovative spaces that emphasize inclusiveness, to models of embedded librarianship to manage these challenges. The international advocacy that she has been involved in, such as getting the UN to adopt public access to information as one of its international goals, requires hard work that demonstrates action.

Leadership in the Library

First, Dr. Parent recommends that libraries inspire and lead with a strategic vision that is developed in consultation with all library stakeholders, translated into concrete deliverables, and able to get the various library units and staff to feel like it directly applies to their work.

Then it is important to cultivate and nurture teams. In particular she spoke about the necessity to cultivate a good workplace morale, which is everyone’s responsibility because leadership is actually a broad activity that encompasses all staff. Leaders are agents of change and part of that change is taking a 10 steps ahead approach. Since looking 10 steps ahead is inherently risky, she advised that thinking hard about risk is important to library leadership.Horrocks 039

She also related some of the hard choices library leaders have to make, especially when libraries are hard-pressed financially. She spoke to this using the example of her oversight of a 3 year deficit reduction plan at UBC, which caused many hard choices to be made. Leadership in that circumstance required working through each negative scenario very thoroughly in order to make the best decision.

Dr. Parent emphasized the unique role the library can play in the field of advocacy. She eluded to an OCLC report that people are starting to think of libraries more and more as an enabling space. Dr. Parent argues that we can make the most of this role and advocate for important issues such as access to copyrighted material, or access to the internet.

In conclusion, Dr. Parent said we need to learn from each other both on a global and local scale. Learning from each other and taking care of each other are key ways in which we can start to understand our roles and responsibilities in being a force for change internationally, in the profession, and in our local institutions.

Lecturer, Ingrid Parent with Horrocks Award winner, Leah Boulos (MLIS '16)

Lecturer, Ingrid Parent with Horrocks Award winner, Leah Boulos (MLIS ’16)

Jan 21st Exhibition Launch: The Emergence of Artist-Run Culture in Halifax

From Creighton Barrett (SIM Lecturer & Digital Archivist, Dalhousie University Archives):

I thought I’d share some details about an exciting exhibition project I’ve been working on with Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. The project features a selection of posters, invitations, and administrative records from two archival fonds held at the University Archives. Mariah Blackmore (MLIS ’16) has done some tremendous work with some of this material and will be providing archival reference services in the gallery on Fridays from 12-4.

We’re having an opening reception on Thursday night at 7 PM. Please come if you can!

 22 JANUARY TO 17 APRIL

“Why are we saving All these artist publications + Other Galleries stuffs?” – THE EMERGENCE OF ARTIST-RUN CULTURE IN HALIFAX

OPENING RECEPTION Thursday 21 January at 7 PM

Curated by Creighton Barrett, Digital Archivist, Dalhousie University Archives, and Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator, Dalhousie Art Gallery

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian artists began to self-organize and establish independent spaces for creating and presenting contemporary art. These spaces were called “parallel galleries” or “alternative spaces” and are now known as artist-run centres. Halifax is home to some of the oldest artist-run centres in the country: between 1970 and 1975, Charlotte Townsend-Gault organized the artist-run Mezzanine Gallery at NSCAD. In 1972, a group of female artists established the Inventions Gallery, but the gallery closed after a fire in 1973. A few former members of Inventions Gallery collaborated to found Eye Level Gallery in 1974. The burgeoning interest in video and installation art led to the establishment of Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT) in 1978.

The emergence of artist-run culture is part of a larger historical narrative of 1960s counterculture, cultural policy debates, and widespread interest in communications and technology. This exhibition explores the formative years of artist-run culture in Halifax, from 1970 through the mid-1980s, by presenting posters and invitations from the Mezzanine Gallery fonds, Eyelevel Gallery fonds, and the Centre for Art Tapes fonds in an integrated chronology. The order is periodically disrupted by thematic groupings of textual records and ephemera clustered around quotations from these early archival documents that capture the growing pains and aspirations of this nascent culture.

“Why are we saving All these artist publications + Other Galleries stuffs?” is the only question scrawled on a list of Eyelevel Gallery members present at a board meeting sometime in 1979. There is no record of an ensuing conversation (unless it remains to be discovered among the linear metres of administrative records). The exhibition will also feature a temporary Archives Room with the archives of Eyelevel Gallery and the Centre for Art Tapes presented in the way in which they are permanently stored in the Dalhousie University Archives. These materials will be available for supervised consultation on Tuesdays and Fridays from 12 to 4 p.m. Visitors are invited to perform research in the gallery and craft their own answer to this everlasting question.

Eyelevel Gallery and the Centre for Art Tapes have been invited to present contemporary programming alongside this historical retrospective, which complements the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia’s exhibition The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-1978.

——————————————————————–
Creighton Barrett
Digital Archivist
Dalhousie University Archives
Tel: 902.494.6490 | Email: Creighton.Barrett@Dal.ca
www.dal.ca/archives

MLIS Alumna Featured in Halifax Magazine

BlandfordMLIS graduate (2015) Alieda Blandford was featured in a Halifax Magazine article about the Little Free Library (LFL) movement in Halifax: http://halifaxmag.com/cityscape/books-to-the-people/

Alieda and a few other MLIS students formed an “action-oriented community group” called FYI Halifax, dedicated to “local literacy projects and information activism”. FYI worked with various community organizations to install LFL’s on Agricola Street and Gottingen Street.

You can read previous coverage of this story on CBC, Dal Faculty of Management News, and Metro News.

We are proud of our student and alumni and the positive contributions they make to their communities. Literacy and information access are important issues that affect all of us, and we hope to see many more LFL’s pop up around Halifax!

 

MLIS-Alum Assisted Patient Education Resource Launches in NS

We’re excited to share the following announcement from the Nova Scotia Provincial Library:

As we close out Canadian Library Month and our theme of Healthy Living, we are pleased to announce that the Nova Scotia Health Authority (formerly Capital Health) Patient Education Pamphlets are now available in all library catalogues in Nova Scotia. These are sources of reliable and locally produced medical information written by NSHA professionals, that are easy to read, and which bring familiarity to unknown medical procedures. 

Our MLIS alumni, Lara Killian and David MacNeil spearheaded this valuable project. Take a look yourself by searching your local library catalogue for “patient education pamphlets”.

 

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Informacy and Metaliteracy: What Literacy looks like in the Age of Google.

By: Domenic Rosati (MLIS Candidate 2017)

Dan Russell’s Information Management public lecture Mindtools: What Does it Mean to be Literate in the Age of Google? was a challenge to common place notions of literacy in an information society heavily dependent on Google and other web services. He offered two alternative concepts that can help us understand what being literate could mean today: Informacy, the operational ability to use contemporary literacy technologies, and Metaliteracy, the ability to learn how to learn literacy technologies.

In order to understand the significance of Informacy, Russell asked us to think about about what it means to be literate. Using the example of reading music, Russell showed that literacy is tied into the ability to operate the technology associated with that literacy. He also mentioned that in the 18th century being literate would have meant knowing how to make a quill and ink. Russell’s point, following Walter Ong’s studies of the transformative effects of writing, is that “Literacy is a technology based system.” Informacy extends the notion of literacy to recognize this technical aspect of literacy. Russell argues that understanding literacy as Informacy is important because new literacy technologies are allowing us to search more than ever before, becoming more ubiquitous, and changing at a rapid rate.  Reading and writing will not be enough for getting around in contemporary society; we will need to understand how to operate the tools we depend on to read and write.

Russell has seen the need for modifying our definitions of literacy in his work in researching user search experience at Google.  His lecture provided us with many examples for his case. First, he mentioned a searcher tasked with finding activities in San Fransisco on a Saturday night. The example was humorous because the searcher began to search for ‘adult activities.’  Russell asked if the searcher was illiterate. While the searcher could read and write, Russell was making the point that not knowing the connotations of certain search conventions was a serious impediment to this searcher finding information. Russell went to on to cite ‘ctrl-f’, spoof sites, internet language and visual conventions of the web as examples where a user must have the knowledge of how these technologies operate in order to use them appropriately and garner information.

Instead of suggesting we get to work implementing technical literacy strategies about how to operate specific tools due to Informacy, Russell explains the need for a second concept: Metaliteracy. By way of statistics about youtube alone, Russell shows how we could never keep up with the amount of information added to the web. Less obvious is that we can also never keep up with the rate at which web sites and applications will change. Metaliteracy is learning how to deal with these changes and additions of content by always asking what is possible with the technology at hand, or learning “what changes and how.” One of the examples of this is his test put to 250 engineers to find a 1977 overhead picture of a certain address. They all failed to look in google earth under the image archive feature. His explanation for this is that the engineers were not looking out for what was possible. Russell also mentioned his son searching for a song using “oh oh oh oh oh song” as a query. Russell thought this would certainly fail and so he rejected the possibility that google could mine millions of QA posts with similar queries and match it with a correct answer. This possibility turned out to work and Russell’s son found the song. A more concrete example of Metaliteracy Russell gives is the grey arrow that expands information in google. He told us if a searcher ignored this button they could think that South Africa only has 6 official languages when it has more. Russell said that an important part of literacy is learning how to pay attention to these technical changes in websites and that Metaliteracy is that process.

His summary suggested that today’s literacy is captured by four, not three, R’s:

  1. Reading
  2. Writing
  3. Arithmetic
  4. Research

The fourth one,  research, is added because Informacy and Metaliteracy are about knowing how to search and find information to read and write about within the framework of contemporary literacy technologies of the web. Without this research component, our reading and writing is not functional. That is, our reading and writing would not operate where information flows.

Both Russell and an audience member agreed that there is a clear distinction between capital-R research and research. Russell notes that we need to move beyond the look and find culture that has pervaded the web into a search and analyze culture. One instance mentioned was the idea of understanding web site credibility as a component of Informacy. As we understand internet genres and visual cues, we can have a better sense of what is credible on the internet. In addition to this, Russell briefly touched on the ability use Google Fusion with data sets found on the internet to get answers from data yourself.

With all of these examples in mind, Russell makes a pretty good case for having a modified understanding of literacy to include both awareness of the technologies that underpin literacy and the processes by which we learn how to learn these technologies. Informacy and Metaliteracy are certainly useful concepts to keep in mind when the technologies and standards you are using today are going to be changed tomorrow and these concepts can help us take hold of current trends that want us as students not to focus on specific software or tools but on the processes that underlay the operation of those tools.

 Listen to an audio recording of the full lecture here.

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