Information Literacy Landscape

One of the outcomes of my NTF project was the concept of a personal Information Literacy Landscape through which each individual moves and which shapes how they respond to any IL interventions. I know it has since been used by a few different folks, so it seems sensible to make it more widely available. I have created a separate page on the blog (see above) which links directly to the IL Landscape map and a more detailed explanation. I welcome any comments and suggestions for improving it and if you find it helpful and make changes to it, I'd be delighted to know

International student support

On monday, I'm visiting Salford University to talk about international student support (again!). I'll be mainly talking about the SCONUL Guidelines, but also a little bit about a new project I'm involved with. This new research, again with Karen Senior and Marie Scopes with whom I worked on the original report, will look at how we support students who are based overseas. Not the traditional distance leaner model, but more students based in overseas or satellite "campuses" of some kind. This is an area which is developing rapidly, but there doesn't seem to have been a lot written about it so far from the library perspective. I hope our research will help plug the gap, so I'd be delighted to hear from folks who are involved in any overseas initiatives, as you may be able to contribute. For now, here is the small collection of information we have discovered so far and here are my Salford slides.

NE and Yorks network meeting

Hey, gimme some bamboo!

I'm looking forward to the inaugural meeting of the NE and Yorkshire Group on information and data handling tomorrow. I blogged about this earlier; it's an attempt to create a group of folks who support researcher training in the areas of information and data handling and use, hopefully getting us working outside of our usual comfort groups. We have over 40 people registered, from a range of different backgrounds, which is a really great start. I'm doing a very short talk about the work we've been doing in SCONUL to redevelop the 7 pillars and there will also be talks from Vitae and RIN about the RDF and the links between the 2 models, but the majority of the time will be spent in developing the network and discussing how the group should work.

Interesting use of data

Pippin "helping"

Thanks to Adam for this link,  an interesting way to use and disseminate data . It's an animation which shows the real-time behaviour of hire bikes in London on October 4th 2010, the day of a major tube strike, and the busiest day for the scheme to date.

Thought we'd have a different black and white animal for a change.

Plagiarism tutorial

Probably the last panda pic

One of the nice things about the RIN Info Handling Group is the wide range of different folks who are involved. It was nice to meet Nicola Siminson from JORUM there last week. Nicola explained to us that JORUM are developing widgets that can be placed on websites in order to make searching for resources easier. She also drew our attention to the plagiarism tutorial  from Leeds University which received a highly commended in the JORUM Learning & Teaching Competition

Incremental project

Panda on a stump

Laura Molloy from the Digital Curation Centre also alerted me to a series of seminars they are running in Glasgow and Cambridge as part of the Incremental Project. This project is looking at the challenges of  short and long term electronic data management. Following on from the HATII project the University of Glasgow has implemented a digital curation training programme for its researchers based on the Digital Curation Centre’s (DCC) Digital Curation (DC 101) course.The Incremental project will build upon this and other existing work, by taking a closer look at the diverse working practices currently in place for creating and maintaining research data across a variety of departments and research groups at the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.
Digital curation is going to feature much more in information literacy in the future, so it's helpful to know about all these initiatives.

DaMSSI Project

I promised Laura another panda!

I thought readers of my blog might like to have some information about the DaMSSI project, which I have a connection with because I'm a member of RIN's Information Handling Working Group. RIN is collaborating with the Digital Curation Centre and JISC to co-fund a new Research Data Management Skills Support Initiative (‘DaMSSI’), which aims to facilitate the use of tools like Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework and the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy in order to help researchers and their institutions to effectively plan data management skills development and training.  Working with JISC’s five current research data management training projects, DaMSSI will undertake analysis and provide guidance and support that will draw from the experiences of these projects.  DaMSSI, which is overseen by the Working Group on Information Handling will run until August 2011. 
This is a very exciting opportunity to bring together models such as the 7 Pillars and the RDF  and to link them to active research projects supported by JISC and I'll be adding information provided by Laura Molloy from DaMSSI to my blog from time to time.