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 October 2007 Volume 5(5)

Conference report

Making an impact

The i3 conference held in June explored the relationship and interconnections between information behaviour, information literacy and the impact of information. Konstantina Martzoukou reports.

The Department of Information Management at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen held a conference recently aimed at scholars and practitioners involved in researching, developing and delivering information and knowledge services. i3 (Information: interactions and impact) offered a four-day forum for the exchange of innovative ideas and brought together an international group of delegates and leading experts from many parts of the world, including Europe, the US, Australia, and Asia.

The keynote speakers came from both academia and industry. Carol Kuhlthau, Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication, Information and library studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, placed emphasis on using information for problem solving and creativity in the workplace and daily living, reflecting on her research on information seeking. Amanda Spink, Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology research at Queensland University, presented an integrated theoretical framework for examining information behaviour, drawing on evolutionary, social and cultural aspects of information behaviour.

Dr Martin Westwell, the deputy Director of the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University, and Dr Bonnie Cheuk, the Head of Knowledge and Information for Environmental Resource Management, delivered equally inspirational talks, which may have spurred a few peripatetic discussions along the River Dee and some new directions for collaborative research. In particular, Dr Westwell explored the landscape of current and future technologies and how they can change the way we think, while Dr Cheuk called for a better understanding of information literacy in the workplace and the role of the information professional in managing knowledge and addressing the problem of ‘information overload’ in an organisation.

The research-based presentations reported new research and methodological issues related to information interactions and impact in community and society, online environments, lifelong learning and education. Each presentation offered valuable insights and provided an excellent platform for reflection and stimulating discussion, which continued throughout the networking opportunities. We also enjoyed the presence of the National Librarian of Scotland, Martyn Wade, who gave a very entertaining speech at the conference dinner.

In the plenary sessions, some interesting common patterns across sessions were revealed. These included the meaning, value and characteristics of information literacy in different contexts and the implications for information literacy instruction; the impact of new technologies and emergent directions for developing services and information literacy programmes for the new generation; the challenge of measuring the impact of information literacy; the value of new models/frameworks for examining information behaviour; the need for pedagogical interventions and the significance of learning theories in the teaching of information literacy; and the need for different methodological approaches for understanding the interconnections between information interactions and impact.

i3 helped us learn a great deal from interacting with a good mix of expertise and stimulated creative and interdisciplinary dialogue which, we hope, will continue long into the future and perhaps until the next i3 conference in 2009.

l A selection of full peer-reviewed papers and keynotes from the conference will be published in a special issue of Libri in March 2008. PowerPoint presentations from some of the conference papers are available at: i3 conference

Dr Konstantina Martzoukou is a Lecturer at the Department of Information Management, Aberdeen Business School, The Robert Gordon University.

Information Scotland Vol. 5(5) October 2007

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