Volume 60, Issue 3

A clear line of argument can be set out to link the (passive) intellectual freedom rights offered by Article Nineteen of the United Nations' Universal Declaration on Human Rights, to a consequent responsibility on governments, professionals and civil society activists for the (active) creation of suitable conditions for the effective exercise of intellectual freedom. Commentators on media in society and socially responsible computing are also increasingly drawing conclusions of this kind and stressing the importance of Media Literacy and Computer Literacy. This line of argument naturally directs attention towards the rationale currently offered for Information Literacy as a focus of professional activity. Whilst there are many elaborately worked-out programmes for Information Literacy instruction, these have so far been largely derived from practical perceptions of need. However, broad statements such as the Prague Declaration ‘Towards an Information Literate Society’ of 2003 and the Alexandria Proclamation of 2005 can be seen as beginning to point towards a rationale for Information Literacy activities rooted in human rights, Article Nineteen in particular. The contention is that starting from a human rights perspective leads towards a strong, inclusive interpretation of Information Literacy. This subsumes Media Literacy, Computer Literacy, Web Literacy and, to a considerable extent, Civic Literacy into a model that serves human needs rather than the established priorities of information professionals. The value of this approach for both practice and research is stressed.

The aim of this longitudinal (years 2002–2009), follow-up study is to increase understanding of potential changes in teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning when a school library was established and developed to change a school's operational culture and its way of working with information. An interdisciplinary approach was justified by the new definitions of both literacy and information literacy (IL), the curriculum's conception of learning, and the teaching practises in the schools. The Activity Theory is used to frame the phenomenon of the school's operational culture in the context of a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funded school library project. The data include reports written by the teachers of 11 comprehensive schools (grades 1–6) during 2002–2004, and teachers' group interviews in the same schools in 2009. The preliminary findings based on the qualitative content analysis of the first Data Set, including the use of QSR NVivo8, show that the teachers emphasised collaboration with other teachers, and they discussed about pedagogical issues after the project more than before. The teachers understood well the necessity to develop the pedagogy in relation to the school library space and materials. In the reports, the teachers focused on teaching IL, teacher collaboration, school's operational culture and teaching methods. The findings indicate that the school library project has increased the use of collaborative working methods and understanding of IL among teachers. The researchers' close involvement with the school library project may be considered as a limitation. However, it may give depth to the interpretation of the results. The next phase of the study will be the analysis of the interview data in relation to the written reports.

This study aimed to evaluate the extent to which Year Seven students, teachers and teacher-librarians, in three rural Australian state schools, would value question formulation as an information literacy skill. Question formulation is defined here as students independently formulating their own questions for curricular assignments. It also aimed to evaluate the extent to which these students would transfer question formulation across subjects and across time. The study used a constructivist grounded theory approach and data were analysed using constructivist grounded analysis. The findings of the study indicated that most students, teachers and teacher-librarians valued question formulation as an information literacy skill, but that this value was often limited in scope, e.g. only in relation to information retrieval. Some students, and most teachers and teacher-librarians, saw extensive value in question formulation and took a more holistic view, e.g. linking question formulation with assignment writing. A small minority of students did not value question formulation as they found it a difficult concept. Students used written questions when required to do so by teachers but some students preferred to develop mental questions when doing assignments. There was some clear evidence of transfer, in that some students applied what they had learned about question formulation in a previous term to a new subject assignment. On the other hand, many other students did not transfer what they had learned, and the evidence showed that this was either because they did not understand the concept of transfer (a small minority), or that they lacked motivation to transfer, or that they expected the teacher and/or teacher-librarian to tell them to formulate their own questions. It was clear from the study that there was no culture of transfer in these schools and that this made it unlikely that students, apart from a well-motivated minority, would transfer skills.

Although higher education (HE) libraries have given increasing attention to information literacy, the information literacy requirements of researchers have been relatively neglected. This paper reports on the findings of a national survey on the training of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the UK, focusing on the information literacy training provided by academic libraries, in the context of generic research skills training programmes provided by HE institutions. Significant differences between librarianled and centrally provided training are highlighted as well as variation in the breadth of information literacy training provided. Key issues in training provision in this area are identified, and options for developing information literacy support for researchers are discussed.

This paper reports on the findings of a study examining how theatre professionals (actors, directors and others) make sense of the works of a culturally iconic author (William Shakespeare). The study aims to address critique of prevailing approaches' excessive focus on active information seeking and searching (Julien, Where to from here? Results of an empirical study and user-centred implications for information design, Taylor Graham, 1999; Wilson, Informing Science 3: 49–55, 2000) by developing a more holistic approach, one which acknowledges the complexity of sense-making as more than the problem-solving behaviour of individuals – as an embodied, social process, involving emotion as well as rationality. In doing so it draws on theoretical approaches from a range of different disciplines and traditions, including Dervin's Sense-Making, Foucault's discourse analysis and Derrida's deconstructionism. The findings of the study are based on interviews with 35 theatre professionals in Canada, Finland and the UK.

In recent years, government at all levels in the UK has increasingly recognised the need for ongoing dialogue between policy makers and stakeholders during the policymaking process. Prompted by a number of factors, including devolution and New Labour's Modernising Government agenda, the number of public consultation exercises conducted annually has grown considerably since the late 1990s. Yet very little has been written on the information management and communication issues surrounding government consultations, nor on the mechanisms of the consultative process more broadly. This paper reports the results of a study (part of a larger ESRC-funded project) which has examined in some detail the provision and accessibility of government consultation information in the UK, with a particular emphasis on information relating to written consultation exercises conducted by the Scottish Government. This study examined the accessibility and communication of information at all stages of the consultation process, from the publication of the consultation paper at the beginning of the exercise, to the production of analysis and feedback at its conclusion. It revealed that, despite the existence of government good practice guidelines which emphasise the need for consultation information and documentation to be clear, accessible and responsive, in reality it is often missing, incomplete, or presented in inconsistent and often confusing ways. Post-consultation feedback, which provides details on how responses have influenced final policy decisions, was found to be particularly lacking.

This paper reports on an approach to the analysis of genre recognition using eye-tracking. The researchers focused on eight different types of e-mail, such as calls for papers, newsletters and spam, which were chosen to represent different genres. The study involved the collection of oculographic behaviour data metrics, such as fixations and saccades to highlight the ways in which people view the features of genres. We found that genre analysis based on purpose and form (layout features, etc) was an effective means of identifying the characteristics of these e-mails. The research, carried out on a group of 24 participants, highlighted their interaction with the e-mail texts and the visual cues or features perceived as well as the strategies they employed for the processing of the texts. The results showed that readers can determine the purpose and form of genres, that form and content can occasionally be separable, that some features cause fixations and that some readers are prompted to respond by using saccadic behaviour (e.g. regressive saccades) over the shape of the e-mails (form).