LILAC 2019

I attended LILAC in Nottingham this year on the final day of the conference as well as the conference dinner on the night before. In response to calls in incorporate more criticality into library work as well as to highlight many of the ways the libraries and library workers marginalise voices and groups, these themes and ideas were much more to the forefront of the sessions I attended and ideas I exchanged.

The presentations aren’t yet available online but I wanted to write this reflection while the enthusiasm and thoughts are still fresh. I can recommend browsing the hashtag on Twitter if you didn’t follow it last week.

visual recording of Allison Littlejohn’s keynote by Cheryl Reynolds

The highlight of the conference for me was Allison Littlejohn’s keynote address. Littlejohn has recently become the Dean of Learning and Teaching for the School of Social Sciences in Glasgow, having moved this month from the Open University. Though not a librarian, she studies ed tech and information/digital literacy. The main thrust of her keynote was highlighting the ways in which commercial interests are shaping how we educate, and pointing out that we should decide which directions we want to go as educators and professionals, and to disrupt the monetization narrative. Her studies on MOOCs are fascinating, as well as the ethnographic research she did with female Wikipedia student authors (more on that in a moment).

 

I would love to summarise it all in agonizing detail but Hannah Hickman’s summaries (of all the sessions she attended, not just this keynote) are great. If this strikes a chord with you, please come talk to me about it because I am full of thoughts I would love to share.

The final roundtable discussion of the day was between several librarians involved in critical library pedagogy, which is all about making power structures apparent. The librarians on the panel talked about ways in which they have incorporated critical pedagogy into their teaching, and were refreshingly honest about what has worked, what was challenging and failures they had. It is a massive challenge but one that offers great potential to us for keeping our library collections and teaching relevant into the future. Again, Hannah Hickman’s summary is ace.

Some other great ideas I came away with:

• Journal club: some libraries run a journal club for staff where every 6 weeks staff gather to read and discuss an article of interest. For the journal club I attended, we read a practically focused teaching strategy article, and discussed it. I think this would be a great way for us (possibly open to colleagues across the library, not just liaison team) to keep our ideas fresh and stimulate our minds, and as a chance to step away from the grind of day to day tasks. Session leaders said that they found that even if staff members didn’t have time to read the entire article, those members still enjoyed the discussions.
• Wikipedia authoring and editing: writing Wikipedia entries is a way to develop students’ research, writing and digital skills. It’s also a tool for social justice, as it allows writers to make their own voices heard and tell their own stories, and also to surface information and heroes that are currently not represented online. At the moment, Wikipedia is a male-dominated space, with low representation of women authors and in articles. The Wikimedian in residence at the University of Edinburgh, Ewan McAndrew, has made a concerted effort to recruit female students to write across a variety of disciplines for a lay audience. He gave powerful examples of a semester-long, archives-based research project which resulted inthis article on the Edinburgh Seven and another which resulted in an article on this common form of ovarian tumour (which formerly had no Wikipedia article).
  Wikipedia editing/authoring is particularly useful for developing communication skills for legal and medical professionals, who will need to learn how to communicate the law and medical issues to non-specialists in their work.
  I think that Wikipedia authoring has massive potential for us at Sunderland, as a tool for empowering our students and staff while at the same time increasing digital and information literacy skills. If anyone wants to talk more about this with me, I have loads more to say!! I think I would like to put something about exploring this in my action plan for this year. Loads more information from the session I attended led by McAndrew is here and here.
• Using the ‘new’ CILIP information literacy definition with students and staff to give them greater insight into what we are teaching. This deceptively simple thing might help students and staff understand the larger picture (we’re not just here to demo library tools…) but to help them navigate and engage critically with all information they encounter. Emma Burnett from Royal Holloway has been doing this in her subjects (and she also gives an ‘information literacy award’ to her students, love that) and reported positively on it.

“Information literacy is the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to develop informed views and to engage fully with society” (CILIP, 2018)

I can imagine saying to academics: I can help students develop the ability to…

I can imagine saying to students: I’m here today to talk to you about xx but it’s part of something larger. What we’re really working on is … as a way of making these skills more relevant to their academic, professional and social lives.

The conference dinner on Thursday was held at Colwick Hall, and I got to sit with Rachel Hunter, who is liaison librarian for business at Coventry University’s London Campus, which has many similarities to our London Campus. On my other side was Hannah Hickman, who is a librarian at the Hive. We really enjoyed talking together about the need for public libraries, craft beer, and our career trajectories. She delivered a very sweary and awesome talk the next day about imposter syndrome and performativity at work, which lays bare many of the authority and power structures at play in our profession.

If anyone wants to talk about attending LILAC in Manchester next year, or about any of the things I learned this year, let’s please have coffee.

Professional Reading: model for Evaluating Sources

ACT UP for evaluating sources

by Dawn Stahura

I recently read this article on the College & Research Libraries News site. I thought it was an interesting model to use in light of fake news and also in terms of critical literacy and critical pedagogy. It’s a lot like what we’ve said in the past but I like that it added Truthfulness and Privilege as things to think about.

I’m not sure if anyone else has covered that before, but up til now I’ve wanted to incorporate more critical pedagogy into my sessions but not really known the best way to start for example I’ve not previously discussed the structure of keywords for example in terms of privilege and what voices may be missing but this model gave a way for me to do that.

I just included it in a session for PG students doing a dissertation and under privilege I used the example of gender in tourism and if you were noticing a lot of the results you were getting were from male authors it might be obvious whose voice was not being represented, but it may not always be obvious and it is one thing to think about along with the usual author, currency etc.