Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal June 2006 Volume 4(3)

Skills for the future

Ivor Lloyd pinpoints Information Literacy as the key role for today’s profession.

What’s impressed me most in my first five months of being President is the calibre of staff we have across all sectors in the profession. I’ve given presentations to Further Education librarians, the University, College and Research Group, the Information Services Group, East Branch, and even met a few at Celtic Connections in Cardiff. It’s heartening to see so many young, enthusiastic and committed librarians and it brings home to me very powerfully the importance of engagement for us all in these events and the extensive variety of opportunities we have through the Groups and Branches structure.

But we should not take this structure for granted, given the financial situation in which CILIP in London finds itself. A favourite buzzword in the university sector at the moment is ‘financial sustainability’ – in other words, are we living within our means? CILIP is not currently, and CILIPS is not going to be able to avoid the turbulence when CILIP takes the necessary steps to rationalise. And this turbulence may be severe so it’s even more vital that we engage with these groups and branches here in Scotland to ensure CILIPS continues to be a thriving, vigorous organisation.

At the Celtic Connections in May – Demonstrating Value – Lorcan Dempsey (Chief Strategist at OCLC) gave us an insight into research confirming how users behaviour in managing information retrieval was changing in response to internet-based technology. He demonstrated how users interaction with libraries – and librarians – was changing rapidly and posed some very interesting questions as to how we respond to these trends.

I considered it appropriate in my Presidential address that I concentrate on how the profession itself can demonstrate value in this fast changing environment, picking up on themes I’ve raised over the last few months.

There is a common strand to all of these themes – how to ensure we use our core professional skills so that we continue to have relevance and impact in an information-rich environment. In Cardiff I talked about how we apply these skills to add value to the wider organisation in which we work, for example in the corporate information area, but also made reference to another example where we’ve ‘demonstrated value’ – information literacy.

Especially in the new universities sector, Information Literacy delivery has been critical in ensuring that librarians are seen as contributing to the core business of teaching. Through it, librarians have enhanced their profile among academic colleagues and have hit all the right buttons – enhancing the student experience, helping students ‘learn how to learn’ and producing ‘employment ready’ graduates.

But it is not only graduates who need to have these skills. The emergence of an information society and knowledge economy requires new methods of working, particularly the necessity to innovate, develop new products and/or services. Taking these to market faster than your competitors, getting them right first time. The world economy has evolved from a manufacturing base to a knowledge base. In many quarters the emerging knowledge economy is fuelling the drive to create an information literate workforce. Based on anticipated workforce trends and characteristics a number of countries including the USA and Australia have now made information literacy skills implicit in national educational goals, as a core element in producing future generations of knowledge workers. The drive to produce information literate populations is strongly advocated by Unesco and leading economists, such as Alan Greenspan, the former Chair of the US National Federal Reserve Board.

Taking a lead role in developing an information literate society is a significant, probably the fundamental, priority facing the profession. Every librarian and information professional, irrespective of sector, is in a position to support this goal of developing an information literate populace. If the librarianship and information profession cannot successfully drive this agenda, we will have missed a golden opportunity to establish and reinforce our relevance and impact. This is vital to counteract the perception that in the presence of the information super highway, the role of the librarian is in decline.

There can be no doubt as to the challenges and difficulties to be addressed in developing society’s information literacy skills. To successfully meet and address these challenges requires a coordinated effort, building on the strengths of the impressive array of activity clearly demonstrable throughout the sectors in which we operate.

At the last CILIPS Council, it was agreed that a Scottish-wide information literacy group be established to help coordinate efforts and to share information and best practice. At the conference, Rhona Arthur discussed in depth the imperative of “integrating literacy,” developing professional partnerships, raising our game, and addressing issues and seizing opportunities in this area. We need to do these things and more if we are to emulate the successes of the librarianship profession in the US and Australia, where information literacy is embedded in the national agenda, particularly within educational curricula.

If we are to survive and thrive as a profession moving into the knowledge economy we must make information literacy successful at local, regional, national and international levels. To achieve this we must come together and work as a cohesive unit. If we fail, not only is it likely that we will suffer as a profession, the communities and clients we serve are likely to become disadvantaged, especially where others are successful in producing future generations of knowledge workers.

Information Scotland Vol. 4(3) June 2006

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