A primer on how to start marketing

Zuzana Helinsky, Library Consultant, zh Consulting, Lund, Sweden, wrote on library marketing in Library Connect Newsletter:
 
“They don’t know what we are doing!” I hear this all over the world in different languages. If it sounds familiar, you need to consider or reconsider the vital task of internal marketing - that is, marketing to university or institutional leaders.
Of course we need to coordinate our communication and involve our colleagues in actively contributing to internal marketing. To get started, we can use some standard tools. I have tried them in my courses, and they work for many libraries. The most important thing is to go through all four stages in establishing marketing routines for the whole library and its staff: analysis, strategy, realization and feedback.

Analysis

Audit the organization and its environment before starting the marketing process. One of the most well-known analyses in the library world is called SWOT, because it looks at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Strategy

To choose the right strategy, a matrix helps to study how a market looks now and in the future. Personally, I prefer the Boston Matrix because it includes the much-needed task of finding “dogs,” or routines to eliminate (see sidebar on page 2). We suffer from keeping up all the old routines, products and services as we introduce new ones. Eliminate some, and make your colleagues do so, to help find more time for marketing and for new concepts.

Dogs - Products or services with a low share of a low-growth market; they consume our time and energy. Consider how to get rid of them.
Stars - Items with high market growth and easy maintenance. Keep and develop your stars.
Milk cows - Products and services with a high share of a static market. They are good for the time being, but keep an eye on them as their share will probably shrink.
Question mark/problem children - They consume resources and generate little return now, but they could improve in the future.

Realization

We must do the legwork. Nobody else will do it for us. We cannot stop after the analysis, state that we have no time, and use that as a reason to not do anything. Sometimes our activities will fail, but we will learn from these failures. The solution is: Just do it!

Feedback

We must listen to our internal customers’ needs and wishes and continually check that we are on the right road. It is too easy to assume what they want, especially if it suits us. Keep an eye on less satisfied clients or users. We can learn more from them than from friends who are satisfied with our offerings.
Our environment is changing all the time. Threats become opportunities, and weaknesses become strengths — or the other way around. (Google could be a threat or an opportunity.) So we must have routines for marketing, assess the process regularly, and:

• Use language they understand - Consult the multitude of studies out there on calculating and reporting ROI (return on investment).
• Repeat the message - It’s not until we almost hate what we are saying because we’ve said it so often that our stakeholders finally start listening.
• Involve vendors - Use your vendors to assist in marketing with special events and promotions.
• Elevate our visibility - Stop thinking that others, especially our internal customers, are automatically interested in libraries. But we can make them interested.

Library products and services are valuable and pervasive - in fact, they are indispensable. Let’s ensure we get that message out to the right people. And remember:
Marketing takes time! Don’t expect results overnight.
Marketing is fun! And it gives us the power to change our situation.

Loyalty: Glimpses from James Kane - SLA

Jill Hurst-Wahl wrote on her blog:
At the SLA Leadership Summit in January 2010, James Kane spoke on loyalty.  Out of that came the loyalty project that several SLA chapters are doing with Kane as well as his appearance at this year's Leadership Development Institute (LDI) on June 12 and his keynote on June 15. Having now seen him twice, I understand why people were so enthusiastic about him.  He is an excellent storyteller with a message that every organization needs to hear in order to understand its members/users/customers.

First here are the handout from James Kane related to his keynote and notes from Don Hawkins.  Neither is a substitute for being in the audience (and neither will my notes).  If you get an opportunity to see Kane in person, take it.

Kane has studied loyalty.  He had defined what loyalty is and discovered what makes each of us loyal.  What surprised me is that loyalty is more complex that I imagined.

While we are focused on people being loyal, we need to recognize that people (e.g., our members) fall into four categories:

• Antagonistic
• Transactional
• Predisposed
• Loyal

Amazing as it may seem, there will be people who are involved in your organization (e.g., members, customers) who don't like you!  For some reason, they are still involved with you and they - as a group - will never go away.  Thankfully, antagonists comprise a small percentage of the group.

Most of your members/customers/users are either transactional of predisposed.  Those that are transactional buy a product or service without feeling any long term obligation.  To borrow an analogy from a former boss, they see the organization as a soda machine.  They put their money in and get a soda.  Next time they may go to a different machine or even decide to forego a soda and head to a drinking fountain instead.

People that are predisposed like what you have, but would go someplace else if something better came along.  These are the people that were happy to shop a the Great American grocery store until Wegmans came to town, and then switched where they bought their food. (This eventually led to Great American going out of business.)  As Kane says, having customers that are happy with you isn't enough, because happy customers will leave when they realize they could be happier someplace else.

People who are loyal do not measure the relationship based on price or convenience.  They are loyal because the organization (or store, etc.) makes their lives better or easier.  In one of his slides at LDI, he had a goal of having 20% of the organization identify themselves as being loyal.  (Identification is done through a survey on those factors that demonstrate loyalty.)

Now here is what interested me the most...not everyone will be loyal!  We all know that to be true, but we don't stop to think what that means to our organizations/businesses.  Yes, we want people who are truly loyal.  The truth is, though, that we need those people who are transactional or predisposed.  We need to attract them, even if it means attracting a different group of them every month/year. And if we want to build organizations only for those that are truly loyal, then we need to spend time thinking about what that means in terms of services and obligations, as well as the number of customers/members/users.

Thinking about conferences (and not just about SLA), those that are predisposed will attend if - for example - their employer will pay for it, it is geographically convenient, the sessions seem to be useful, and there isn't another conference that looks better. 

Someone who is transactional will attend the conference but may have sensitivities about place, topic, etc.   I could imagine that person might even join the organization in order to get a lower registration fee, but wouldn't see that as a long-term commitment.

Those that are loyal will attend no matter what! With them there is the feeling that which trumps everything (e.g., geography, etc.) that the conference will make their lives better.

Thinking about the Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference, about 50% of the audience each year is attending their first CIL.  Of the other 50%, there is some segment that has attended many of them.  For them, the conference is a "family reunion", where sitting around and talking is as important (or more important) than the sessions.  These are also the people who will go the extra mile to help make the conference a success, because it is "their" conference. 

James Kane is working with several SLA chapters on a loyalty project. The goal is to help the chapters engage their members so that more of them are loyal. Kane's handout gives an overview of the things that must be considered when developing loyalty.  You'll notice that loyalty is a two-way street.  You must give of yourself in order to receive loyalty.  Giving isn't always easy because we think we might be giving something away for free.  That "giving", however, can take a number of forms and what is received is important (loyalty).

Kane has written two books and I suspect a few articles.  I need to get my hands on some of his writings to inform my thinking, because I'm going to be thinking about this for quite a while.  I'll try blog about this more as I gather more information.

Google Shuts Down Ambitious Newspaper Scanning Project

Jill Hurst-Wahl reported that Google is shutting down one of its digitization efforts.  In a statement to Search Engine Land, a Google spokesperson said:

Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing.

Google's efforts were in partnership with several North American newspapers, ProQuest and Heritage Microfilm, according to a 2008 news report.

In reporting on Google's decision, the Boston Phoenix wrote:

News Archive was generally a good deal for newspapers -- especially smaller ones like ours, who couldn't afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it would have cost to digitally scan and index our archives -- and a decent bet for Google. It threaded a loophole for newspapers, who, in putting pre-internet archives online, generally would have had to sort out tricky rights issues with freelancers -- but were thought to have escaped those obligations due to the method with which Google posted the archives. (Instead of posting the articles as pure text, Google posted searchable image files of the actual newspaper pages.) Google reportedly used its Maps technology to decipher the scrawl of ancient newsprint and microfilm; but newspapers are infamously more difficult to index than books, thanks to layout complexities such as columns and jumps, which require humans or intense algorithmic juju to decode. Here's two wild guesses: the process may have turned out to be harder than Google anticipated. Or it may have turned out that the resulting pages drew far fewer eyeballs than anyone expected.

The lesson is that jumping on the Google bandwagon can be good thing, if the wagon keeps on moving. A lesson that those involved in Microsoft's book digitization program also learned the hard way.

Knowledge Management VS Information Management

Dr. Sue wrote a new post "Is knowledge management really information management?: a question of crucial definition" on her blog digitalcollaboration. I thought to share. Dr. Sue wrote:

No, I am not going to repeat the argument so well put forward many years ago by Tom Wilson (The nonsense of knowledge management, 2002, http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html), with which I largely agree.  While Professor Wilson argues his case well, he largely comes to the conclusion that the term ‘knowledge management’ was formulated in order to cover a number of organisational managerial and communication issues, without much of a nod to – or even recognition of – the existing field of Library and Information Science, or Information Studies, or Information Studies, or whatever you want to call it.  This poverty of nomenclature – the continuing disregard that we information professionals seem to have to clarity of expression – is at the heart, I believe, of many of the perennial issues and problems that fracture our field to no real purpose.

Wilson has, from time to time, referred back to ‘knowledge management’, reinforcing his point that, as a practice or field of study, it doesn’t really exist as a separate entity, as it is identical in process and conception to information management.  What would help his argument enormously, I believe, is if he were able to use definitions for these terms (‘information’ and ‘knowledge’) that had achieved consensus in the field.  Then, we would not have to explain to all of those involved in this field, many of whom are drawn from management, information systems, business studies, technology and so forth – exactly what it is that needs to be done in order to manage ‘knowledge’.  We could perhaps even encourage these folk to take a look at the masses of research already completed in our field concerning precisely the issues with which knowledge managers now engage: assisting in the communication of ideas from one human to another.  As I have written elsewhere (e.g. 2005 and 2007), I understand information professionals to be ‘information interventionists’: we intervene in the knowledge creation cycle.

The central issue, though, is that we importantly have not yet come to a widely accepted definition of ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’.  By this I mean, rather more precisely, that we do not have an operational definition that works for our field and for the work we do.  James Gleick, author of Chaos, inter alia, has now published a book on information: ‘Information: a history, a theory, a flood‘ (Fourth Estate, 2011) and one must admire him for his courage and ability to do so.  Having said that, he does not move us forward to understand better what ‘information’ is.  Neither does philosopher Luciano Floridi, who has written extensively on this topic and on the philosophy of information.  However much the data-information-knowledge model (often represented in pyramid form) is criticised or maligned, this still remains the starting point, or mental model, for both authors.  In Gleick’s case, the concept is further confused with information objects or entities, technology, networks and the new physics.  I find the understanding of information in the new physics fascinating: Information: the new language of science is probably my favourite book on this subject.  But this does not conceptualise the notion of  ’information’ in a way that is meaningful for those of us who wish to assist people to create their own knowledge by finding out what others have thought, created, felt, experienced and so on.

This is why I wrote a PhD thesis on the topic of defining information. What I found in my research, amongst many other interesting things, is the political nature of the definition and interpretation of information, and I believe it would be appropriate for us to pay more attention to such dimensions of the core of our discipline/profession.

A checklist to Maximise the Effectiveness of Online Resource

The following is the succinct checklist of items raised in the series of workshops commissioned by Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) during 2010 under the title Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness (MORE). The purpose was to promote most effective use of the internet by SCA member organisations, with an emphasis on promoting and communicating content available as an online resource. The workshops were delivered to around 300 participants from all over the UK, from a variety of further (FE) and higher education (HE) and public sector organisations.  

1. Recognise advantages in having well prepared scalable content that can be utilised in “more is better” scenarios.
2. Understand the potential of audience engagement using the web.
3. Consider the longer term benefits of having computable content.
4. Search engine providers want their users to find exactly what they are looking for, so describe your content accurately using titles, description, keywords.
5. Use text for all important content.
6. Monitor and measure how your site is being used and define success.
7. Search engine optimisation cannot be ignored, but it is not everything.
8. Know your audience.
9. New standards enhance the value of content by enabling informative structure.
10. Many benefits of new standards can be realised with older browsers by referencing ready made non intrusive javascript.
11. RSS can extend the reach of suitable web site content.
12. Keep things simple on a web page to prevent creating barriers to accessibility.
13. Employ simple web based services to check the integrity of content and associated keywords.
14. Embedded metadata can open up new possibilities for the use of content.
15. Online social media can play a prominent role in attracting and engaging an audience.
16. The social web is not new, it’s what the web was always intended to become.
17. Audiences are already in the social web—it’s the best place to engage with them.
18. Decide on a purpose for adopting the social web and use the best service for that.
19. Be aware of valid organisational concerns over the use of the social web.
20. A mix of expertise is required to maximise effectiveness.
21. This expertise should be associated with different roles and responsibilities.
22. The coordination of these roles should be an essential part of the web strategy of an organisation.
23. A policy can allay concerns over the use of the social web by an organisation.
24. There is no magic formula for a organisation wide social web policy—it depends on many organisation specific factors.
25. The process of compiling a policy should involve a probing review that brings focus to benefits and workable processes.
26. RDF is a very basic scheme for describing things using unambiguous terms in brief statements known as triples.
27. RDFa is a way of including RDF in an ordinary web page to embed metadata.
28. RDF metadata in a web site can be used by software applications to detect semantics.
29. Web sites containing RDF can be linked when there is overlap in the triples.
30. There is a growing number of online resources using RDF and real semantics to create a more effective web of resources. 

Role of Professional Associations & Leadership

A professional association (also called a professional body, professional organization, or professional society) is usually a non-profit organization seeking to further a particular profession, the interests of individuals engaged in that profession, and the public interest.[1]

The roles of the professional associations have been variously defined: "A group of people in a learned occupation who are entrusted with maintaining control or oversight of the legitimate practice of the occupation;"[2] also a body acting "to safeguard the public interest;"[3] organizations which "represent the interest of the professional practitioners," and so "act to maintain their own privileged and powerful position as a controlling body."[3]

In Pakistan, PULISAA’s Annual Dinner is scheduled on 9^th April at Punjab University Lahore, Pakistan. Pakistan Library Association’s election schedule has also been announced.  I was thinking about the role of professional leadership/association. I extended the roles as follows:

• Create a Shared Vision
• Unite the professionals in one direction
• Map the Change
• Prepare the professionals to cope with the change and turn challenges into opportunities
• Enhance the skills and broaden the vision of professionals
• Create a sense of importance to belong your professional organization/association
• Safeguard the public interests
• Represent the interest of the professionals
• Act to maintain their own privileged and powerful position as a controlling body

References:

1. Professional association

2.   ^ Professional body at Analytic Quality Glossary

3. ^ ^{a b} Harvey, L. and Mason, S., 1995, The Role of Professional Bodies in Higher education Quality Monitoring. Birmingham: QHE.

Key Questions for the Library and Education Communities

2020 Visioning Process: Key Questions for the Library and Education Communities 

The Regents Advisory Council on Libraries (RAC) invited broad input from the library and education communities to inform development of a new statewide plan for library services. I think that the following questions adopt by RAC are equally important for the library associations/institutions/bodies in other parts of the world to think and seek answers:

1. What are the two most important roles of libraries today?  What will they be in the future?  How will libraries fulfill these future roles?
2. What are the greatest challenges libraries will face over the next 10 years?  What assets and resources do libraries have that can overcome these challenges?  What are the barriers that will prevent libraries from meeting these challenges?
3. How can library service be extended to those currently not using libraries?  How do we engage community members in connecting their needs to libraries?
4. What will be the most important roles of school libraries in the future?  What will increase the visibility and relevance of school libraries?
5. How can academic libraries be more integral to their own institution’s community? Is there a role for academic libraries beyond the campus?  If so, what is that role?
6. What can public libraries do to ensure their survival?  How can they better serve their communities?
7. What will be the most important roles of special and research libraries in the future?  What will increase the visibility and relevance of special and research libraries?
8. What are the greatest challenges facing New York State’s libraries systems over the next 10 years?  What are the assets and resources library systems will need to meet these challenges?
9. How can the State Library and the State Education Department help libraries position themselves to successfully meet the needs of all New Yorkers for library services in 2020 and beyond?
10. What will be the impact on libraries with the rapid growth of commercial information sources like streaming video, iTunes, and e-books?  How can libraries prosper in a Digital Age?

Royal Society: Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century

The Royal Society has released Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century. The report is in 3 parts and excerpts are as follows:

Knowledge, Networks and Nations reviews, based on available data, the changing patterns of science, and scientific collaboration, in order to provide a basis for understanding such ongoing changes. It aims to identify the opportunities and benefits of international collaboration, to consider how they can best be realised, and to initiate a debate on how international scientific collaboration can be harnessed to tackle global problems more effectively.

Part 1 maps and investigates where and how science is being carried out around the world and the ways in which this picture is changing. Important points of discussion of Part 1 are:

• Science in 2011 is increasingly global
• Traditional ‘scientific superpowers’ (USA, Western Europe, Japan)still lead the field. 
• The emergence of new players and leaders point towards an increasingly multipolar scientific world
• Science is also flourishing economic development and addressing local and global issues of sustainability.

Part 2 reveals the shifting patterns of international collaboration:

• The scientific world is becoming increasingly interconnected, with international collaboration on the rise.
• Collaboration is growing for a variety of reasons as collaboration enhances the quality of scientific research and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of that research as the scale of both budgets and research challenges grow.
• The primary driver of most collaboration is the scientists themselves.
• The connections of people, through formal and informal channels, diaspora communities, virtual global networks and professional communities of shared interests are important drivers of international collaboration.
• Collaboration brings significant benefits, both measurable (such as increased citation impact
  and access to new markets), and less easily quantifiable outputs, such as broadening research
  horizons.

Part 3 explores the role of international scientific collaboration in addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time.

• The global scientific community is increasingly charged with or driven by the need to find solutions to a range of issues that threaten sustainability. These ‘global challenges’ have received much attention in recent years, and are now a key component of national and multinational science strategies and many
  funding mechanisms.
• Global challenges are interdependent and interrelated.
• Valuable lessons can be drawn from existing models in designing, participating in and benefiting from global challenge research.
• Science is essential for addressing global challenges, but it cannot do so in isolation.
• All countries have a role in the global effort to tackle these challenges.

The major recommendations are as follows:

1. Support for international science should be maintained and strengthened.
2. Internationally collaborative science should be encouraged, supported and facilitated.
3. National and international strategies for science are required to address global challenges.
4. International capacity building is crucial to ensure that the impacts of scientific research are shared globally.
5. Better indicators are required in order to properly evaluate global science.

Tips on Writing a Successful Proposal for Funds

I have just gone through a post of March 3, 2011 on JISC Digitization blog. JISC funds every year a significant number of digitization projects in UK. The post presents precise but well elaborated tips to write a successful bid for a digitization project. Although the advice is focused on JISC funding matrix but I believe it is equally important for other funding proposals too. The tips are as follows:


As when buying a car we would expect it to have some basic components without much questioning (four wheels, a steering wheel, lights, seats and so on), it goes without saying that in a bid one would expect to see addressed all the relevant sections mentioned in the call (aims and objectives, methodology, project management, risks, dissemination, evaluation, sustainability and so on).

That said, the following are a number of issues that markers tended to highlight as problematic in many unsuccessful applications:

• - need for more clarity and detail on what a project is proposing to do, who is doing what, when and how. Often these things are clear in the mind of the writer but not so for an “outsider” to the project, so it’s always a good idea to have an application read by somebody else as well before submitting it;
• - importance of the proposed work: again, while this may be self-explanatory to those writing a proposal mainly because of their subject area expertise, it is fundamental that the value of a project is well articulated and a strong case made for why this particular project should be funded – as opposed to any other competitor project. For example, why is a particular collection important to digitise? Who is it for? How will it benefit teaching, learning and research? What are we missing out at the moment from this collection not being easily available? And what could users do, that they can’t do now, with the collection once it’s online and accessible to them?
• - any supporting evidence of current use or need for the proposed work will add weight to the application, and strengthen its case for funding – rather than more generic statements such as “this resource will improve teaching and learning…”;
• - impact: as a funding body, it is important for us to see that investing in a project doesn’t only benefit the institution receiving the grant – although obviously they are the main beneficiaries – but that the work is of relevance, or potential relevance, to the wider community and that through the right dissemination it can cascade through the sector, be it through case studies, exemplars, toolkits, the resource itself, technologies…Also, aligning a project strategically both within the host institution and through external links to other relevant organisations, networks and initiatives helps show that a project is well placed within its area of work;
• - stay within scope of the call: this is perhaps not one of the most common failings, but it does happen that sometimes a project is perfectly valid but it’s just not in line with the requirements and the scope of that particular call, and a lot of effort in writing the bid has been wasted.

Pakistan Research Repository

Pakistan Research Repository is a project of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan to promote the international visibility of research originating out of institutes of higher education in Pakistan. Users are able to download the fulltext PhD theses originated in Pakistani institutions of higher education.

The aim of this service is to maintain a digital archive of all PhD theses produced indigenously to promote the intellectual output of Pakistani institutions. It provides a free, single-entry access point to view the manuscript of research executed, and distribute this information as widely as possible.
The repository which is currently being populated with content has already made the full-text of PhD theses available in high-quality digitized format, whilst a further theses are in process of digitization. Higher Education Commission has introduced a systematic mechanism for the collection and digitization of all the theses produced so far in Pakistan.

The repository offers browsing option by Subjects, Years, Type Institutions.While advance searching is also available.

You may access Pakistan Research Repository at http://eprints.hec.gov.pk/

The Transformation of Knowledge

Knowledge assumes many forms and behaves in anomalous and unpredictable ways. Unlike the tangible resources of the industrial economy, there is little shared understanding of knowledge as an economic factor despite its immense importance in the global economy. Yet the knowledge-based economy, conventionally measured by the composition of the workforce, is in flux. It is plainly characterized by an explosion of data and codified knowledge, propelled by a revolution in information and communication technologies, but the changes go much deeper.
The generation of knowledge is traditionally conceived as a process internal to single entity. But it is increasingly a product of networked entities, often differently situated yet motivated to find new solutions to specific problems, needs, and circumstances – and, in many cases, to reveal these solutions to others. Enabled by technology, knowledge moves quickly within these networks – across firms, institutions, borders, and distances. While scientific research has long been characterized by unfettered circulation of discoveries and the ability to build instantly on these discoveries, distributed models are gaining importance and becoming essential to the larger fabric of the knowledge-based economy.
There are paradoxical elements in the transformation of knowledge that are difficult to model for policymakers. Knowledge tasks and processes are both accelerating and decentralizing. At the same time, important forms of knowledge are becoming more complex and context-specific, and the span and heterogeneity of knowledge forms is increasing. Complex forms may incorporate both tacit and explicit elements, thereby becoming less like digitally codified information objects and more difficult to replicate outside of the original location.
Furthermore, there are multiple factors behind this transformation, including:

• globalization of communications and commerce;
• commoditization of ICTs (and partial commoditization of codified knowledge);
• the increasing role of scientific research in innovation;
• advanced, integrative information infrastructure;
• modularization, vertical disaggregation, and outsourcing; and
• expanded value chains and clusters with new categories of actors.

An expanding environment for creating and managing knowledge recasts a wide range of policy issues, including public investment priorities, program design, dissemination of research results, technology transfer, and the form and scope of private controls on information and knowledge. Tension arises from the fact that governments, universities, and private companies operate in different ways and under different rules, yet there are compelling reasons to encourage rapid movement of knowledge across sector and institutional borders. The open, global nature of science and the scale and scope economies of cyberinfrastructure argue for international cooperation in support of diverse users in academia, government, and industry. The success of university-industry technology transfer in the U.S., the public funding of large cross-sector teams in Europe, and the seeding of new markets for technology all reflect the importance of moving research and technology across boundaries in order to facilitate commercialization. Moreover, optimal design and exploitation of cyberinfrastructure ultimately depend on a deep, contextual understanding of knowledge and its modalities, and a case can be made that cyberinfrastructure should be explicitly open to interconnection and privatization, as was the case for the federally subsidized Internet.
More generally, a deeper understanding of knowledge is needed to support the vast knowledge-related investments, institutions, and laws throughout the economy. Although there is a practice-oriented literature on knowledge management, the microeconomics of knowledge is poorly understood. Most movements of knowledge between entities do not pass through conventional priced markets – and cannot be counted as transactions. Knowledge does not come in discrete units, and the most valuable knowledge is often the most difficult to capture and evaluate. Knowledge is continually transformed by technology, market conditions, and institutions. Just as businesses and knowledge professionals struggle to understand and manage knowledge as a strategic resource, policymakers are challenged to develop public policies that properly account for the diverse natures and uses of knowledge. Yet the growing scope, scale, and economic importance of knowledge demands an assessment that contributes not only to scientific understanding but to democratic decision-making about the future of knowledge and the policies needed to realize that vision.

Source: Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy at the National Academies, 21st and Constitution Ave., Washington, DC, 10-11 January 2005

What is Information Literacy?

Information literacy emerged as focused area in libraries and information management in recent years . The phrase has developed various meanings over the past couple of decades, However, ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards, defined information literacy:
Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information."1

 Wayne Bivens-Tatum wrote that the standards are both broad and deep and list the the basic standards as following:

1. The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
2. The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
3. The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
4. The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
5. The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.

 He argued:

Standards 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, the ones that librarians would typically have the most direct effect on, though often in relatively limited circumstances. Many of us in academic libraries routinely teach students how to find the kind of information they need for research, and give them suggestions on how to evaluate it which they may or may not apply.
I'm not sure who besides the student could be responsible for Standard 3, and I have no idea how that would be assessed in any broad way. What's clear from the research I've read about is that most people have trouble incorporating new information into their knowledge base and value system, especially if it conflicts with values they already hold. But a rigorous liberal education should help people get past that barrier. Regardless, Standard 3 is really quite expansive, and unless they're actually teaching an information literacy class (or a writing class, where I've worked on this with students), librarians typically aren't working with students to evaluate information in any depth or look at sources critically. This requires that both the librarian and the student have read the work.  I could be mistaken, though. How many librarians out there discuss any books or articles in depth with students and help them evaluate them critically? Pointing out how to tell primary from secondary sources or scholarly from popular articles is one thing, or doing a quick website evaluation to show that some website is biased or unauthoritative, but those are relatively superficial compared to reading and discussing works with students, and it's the reading and discussion that teaches students how to evaluate well and signals whether something has been comprehended, much less evaluated. I'll grant it can happen, and just last week I helped a student working on an essay by discussing the course reading with him and helping him generate ideas, but that's unusual.
Standard 4 is also goes beyond the level of student involvement that most librarians have. Accomplishing a specific purpose can be interpreted many ways, but the specific purpose of most students I see is writing a research essay of some kind. I help them find sources, discuss the different kinds of sources their are and what they could do for an essay, but I don't work with them in the way that instructors would, and I'm usually not in a position to know if they've accomplished their task well. When I teach writing, I do work with students to help them write research essays, which often involves seeing how students use their sources in their writing and teaching them how to use the sources more appropriately. That's work I could do as a librarian, but it's not work I normally do. Librarians who teach courses that have research components have that sort of direct role, but other than that how many do? In addition, the Standard implies that this can be done repeatedly, for any project. Given the relatively limited time most librarians have directly with students, how much would our direct teaching enable students to reach that point without significantly more guidance than we typically give?

Standard 5 is a complete washout, because no one but librarians and publishers seems to care much how information is acquired as long as it's easily acquired. I've written before arguing that the legal and economic barriers to scholarly information are incompatible with scholarly values. For example, if scholars want access to articles their library can't get for some reason, they'll go through informal and technically illegal channels to get those articles. Standard 5 says the information literate person uses information ethically and legally, but I think there are cases where scholarly ethics and copyright law conflict. The very willingness of otherwise ethical scholars to defy certain copyright laws supports my point. Though I wouldn't advocate piracy of copyrighted information to anyone, this standard contains more than just "literacy." It's an ethical injunction as much as anything, and for the other standards to be met, sometimes it might be necessary to acquire something illegally. Finding information and incorporating it into your worldview to accomplish a task isn't the same as using the information legally.

Notes

1.    American Library Association. Presidential Committee on Information Literacy. Final Report.(Chicago: American Library Association, 1989.)