Maria-Carme Torras i Calvo

Mapping Collective Information Practices in the Workplace

The collective management of informational resources, or the “information landscape”, within two workplace settings is investigated through a methodology based on facilitated concept mapping sessions using a non-digital tool. Mapping raises information literacy practice – the ongoing, critical judgments about information, made within these communities – into the conscious awareness of both the research team and the participants. The maps therefore both provoke and record the intersubjective agreements that are continuously being made in these communities, and which constitute the information landscape.

Changing Libraries: Facilitating Self-Reflection and Action Research on Organizational Change in Academic Libraries

Visualization and mapping techniques can build a dynamic picture of information practices, including action research, within libraries, raising awareness of how the information landscape at each library may both support and retard research into the librarys information practices. These techniques have implications for researchers as they generate richer data than interview or survey techniques, or methods that only take one “snapshot” of the state of practice. The data are also available to participants immediately, thus, allow for co-operative inquiry to take place in the library. Examples are offered from a project under way in two Norwegian academic libraries.

Productive Partnerships to Promote Media and Information Literacy for Knowledge Societies: IFLA and UNESCO’s Collaborative Work

Building knowledge societies in the 21st century can only be achieved through targeted policies. Drafting such policies remains an international, regional and national challenge. In this paper, we make a case for productive partnerships as a necessary condition for the effective development and implementation of targeted policies which remove the barriers to open, inclusive, participatory, fair and sustainable societies. More specifically, we focus on IFLA and UNESCO’s collaborative activities in one shared priority area, media and information literacy, in order to illustrate the necessity and value of partnerships beyond geographical borders, across sectors, institutions, organisations and professional groups.

Mapping the Landscape of Practice across Library Communities

Two academic libraries undergoing significant organizational changes were the location for a project that researched how staff members and subunits of the libraries made collective judgments, negotiated what is sometimes called the “landscape of practice”—the collective body of knowledge of their profession—and thus came to collective understandings about how to manage the changes they faced. Over a year, participants engaged in a series of facilitated sessions of concept mapping in which they created maplike diagrams depicting their knowledge of the library’s operation. These sessions both facilitated and recorded the intersubjective agreement that staff members reached regarding the relevance of the resources available to them. These mapping sessions helped participants cross the boundaries between different communities of practice, groups of people working in the same professional area. The sessions enhanced participants’ reflection on their own practices and their knowledgeability of other practices across the landscape of the library. The project shows how techniques for learning stewarding and enhancing knowledgeability can be integrated into a workplace environment, whether an academic library or elsewhere.

How Groups Talk Information Literacy into Being

A research project considered how groups make collective judgments about information in workplaces, employing a mapping methodology that raised judgments into collective awareness and ‘talked them into being’ as representations on a map. Recordings of conversations held during mapping sessions reveal the role of facilitation, and how facilitators and participants learned to use mapping to help make judgments about information and practices. Group judgments about relevance can be captured in ways that may remain hard to embed in information systems viewed only as technology, but nevertheless help embed these judgments in sociotechnical systems.

Access to Knowledge as a Social Practice: Information Literacy Education for MA Students

Rapid technological developments as well as changing trends in scholarly publishing and communication have made student’s access to and interaction with scientific knowledge a complex and often overwhelming experience. In the words of a first term Master of Arts (hereafter MA) student: “The difficult thing is to find just what you need, and not thousands of articles about completely irrelevant stuff.” Against this backdrop, the academic librarian’s educational role needs to be reconsidered if the academic library, with its expertise and wealth of sources, is to stay relevant and add value to the student’s academic experience. The aim of this chapter is to explore how the academic librarian can facilitate MA students’ access to knowledge. More specifically, a model of information literacy education is put forth which aims at facilitating students’ access to scientific knowledge in their research process. Access to knowledge is understood in this chapter as intellectual access (Buckland 1991), and not just as physical/electronic access to sources of knowledge. Students’ intellectual access to knowledge encompasses the following aspects: