Merry Christmas everyone! We thought we would update our readers with what has been happening on the project since we joined.
On Monday 12 December, Louise attended a very interesting and thought-provoking event on Information Literacy as a Graduate Attribute at the University of West London Library. The focus of the event was on how information literacy can contribute to employability and graduate attributes for university leavers. The consensus amongst speakers and attendees was that information literacy is vital and central to both the daily life of university students and their continuing professional and personal lives after graduation, enhancing as it does key attributes that employers look for, such as good communication skills, team-working, self-motivation, self-management, writing skills, problem-solving abilities and confidence, but it is not always easy to embed information literacy in the academic programme or to sell its benefits to employers. The event gave her lots of ideas for the benefits analysis of employability and information literacy.
The schools advocacy resources are progressing well. We have produced a final draft of a leaflet for school librarians to use to promote information literacy within their schools. The leaflet will be available on the project website in January 2012. Sarah is currently creating resources for academic librarians to promote information literacy to students on initial teacher training. We are also liaising with Katy Burns to chart progression and gather feedback on the CQFW-accredited learning units in information literacy that are currently being piloted by library staff at Llandrillo College and Cardiff and Vale College, and by the CLOCH (Conserving Local Communities Heritage) project led by Glamorgan Archives, which is recruiting trainees to work and gain accredited skills in the heritage sector through work placements in libraries, museums and archives. We have already had some useful reports from Carolyn Howe at Cardiff and Vale College, and look forward to more!
If you would like to get in touch with Louise or Sarah, our new project email address is:welshinformationliteracy@cardiff.ac.uk. You can also follow us on Twitter @Welsh_Info_Lit. We are really pleased to see our number of Twitter followers is increasing – 937 at the last count!
Finally, we wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2012!
