Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of all the sessions I attended, I’m going to use this space to reflect on what I’ve taken away from the conference, and the main themes that stood out to me. Most of the slides from the conference are now available on the Information Literacy Group’s Slideshare (with more being added as I write), so I’ll link to any that are available for specific talks I refer to. As usual, the Information Literacy Weblog produced live summaries of many talks (live-blogged by my very excellent PhD supervisor, Dr Pam McKinney!), so I’d also recommend these for anyone interested in more detail on what was discussed.

For me, the main themes that emerged were reflection, emotions, and values. I’m going to talk about each of these in turn and why they resonated with me.

Reflection

At the risk of this becoming a bit circular, one of my main messages from LILAC this year was the importance of reflection! This has got me reflecting on what we mean by reflection, and how reflexive practice informs my work.

Jess Haigh gave a truly excellent presentation on “LILAC Stories”, her research into the impact of the LILAC conference. This was genuinely one of my favourite sessions this year – and not just because Jess is a pal, and I helped contribute some data for her research! Jess has done some really fascinating research into why people attend LILAC, what they get out of it, and the long-term impact of attending the conference. She found evidence that LILAC has contributed directly to individuals’ career progression, collaborations, and information literacy research and practice. She also discussed how important reflection is in ensuring that all the good ideas that come out of LILAC actually translate into practice.

It got me thinking about how I reflect after events like LILAC. This has partly influenced how I’m writing this blog post right now – in the past I think I’ve tended more towards reporting on events rather than reflecting on them. I deliberately left it a week before even starting to draft this post, partly for personal reasons (I really REALLY needed a break after LILAC!), but also because I wanted to give my ideas some time to settle. I’ve also written it slowly, over the course of a month, which has allowed me to let some ideas settle and give them some deeper thought. 

The session also made me think about how we encourage and enable this kind of reflective practice. In a way, being able to let this lengthy reflection drift for more than a month has been a privilege, since I am unemployed and didn’t have to churn out a quick report back to my employer! (In other ways it is very much not a privilege, just ask my bank balance…) Prior to taking redundancy last year and becoming a full-time student, if I’d let this much time pass after an event to publish a blog post about it then it probably just wouldn’t happen. How much have my reflections suffered in the past for having been rushed?

I am also interested in how, as a profession, we can support each other to do better and more thoughtful reflection. The closing session of LILAC this year was focused on reflective practice, although unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay for that. I did contribute to the Padlet set up for LILAC reflections, and I believe it is still open for contributions if anyone has other reflections to share. In my role as co-Chair of the Information Literacy Group, I’m really keen to see how we can better support reflective practice, both after LILAC but also on a more ongoing basis. I have some ideas that may or may not work out, so watch this space!

Reflection also came up more explicitly in several other presentations. I was really impressed by a presentation from Veronica Arellano Douglas and Natalia Kapacinskas at the University of Houston, Texas, about reflection for assessment of information literacy. The team there has created a fantastic toolkit for reflective assessment, which if I were still working in a library I would definitely be advocating for my team to use! They described a really thoughtful process of implementing reflective practice over two academic years. The first year focused entirely on staff development, introducing everyone to reflective practice and identifying areas each individual wanted to develop. The second year (which is ongoing) focused on implementing reflective assessment in student learning. I adore this approach – it’s so important to get everyone on board with new approaches like this, and it sounded like they’d done so in an incredibly supportive way. Similarly, a presentation from Meredith Knoff at Indiana University Bloomington focused on how they use reflective practice in training postgraduate students at their institution to act as “student research associates”, providing peer-support at the library helpdesk. Again, I was struck by how inclusive and supportive this process was. I would love to see more of this kind of practice in libraries!

Emotions

The emotional side of information literacy came up in several sessions throughout the conference. This is something that I am interested in exploring in my own research, so I was very interested to hear from others how they had encountered this often overlooked aspect of information literacy. To me, information literacy teaching and support has always been about recognising the whole person, and all the baggage they may bring with them to the information encounter. This is frequently a more emotional process than many outside of librarianship may expect!

The idea was discussed most explicitly by Veronica Arellano Douglas and Natalia Kapacinskas at the University of Houston, Texas, who spoke about the role of emotion in access to information on reproductive health, illness and disability. These are clearly emotive topics, and people who are seeking information related to these topics are often doing so because they are experiencing them themselves. There are strict societal expectations around the “proper” way to experience life events like infertility, pregnancy loss or chronic illness, which are reflected in what information is readily available about these topics. This can form a barrier to information seeking, as the information available may be in conflict with their lived experiences. Someone seeking information to help deal with complex emotions such as shame or anger, for example, may find that there is little in the available information that reflects these emotions. The presenters used the concept of “information marginalisation” to discuss this topic, which was a concept I had not come across before but would like to read up on further. I’ve saved Gibson and Martin’s 2019 paper on the topic to read later.

Having seen Gillian Siddall talk about her use of photovoice at LILAC 2024, I was really excited to hear her update this year as she discussed the results of her research with international students. Emotion also featured heavily in her research findings, as themes of hope, optimism and self-motivation were apparent from the ways in which the international students who co-produced the research discussed their university experiences. One thing that struck me was the use of “positive self-talk”: the students acknowledged how difficult things could be, but were able to focus on positives and the ways they could succeed. I also appreciated seeing the students’ feedback on the co-production of the research, identifying that it made them feel like they mattered and that the university respected their thoughts.

And of course, Jane Secker’s musical journey through her lifetime of IL advocacy in the Day 2 keynote also included many emotional touchpoints! Among the many excellent points she made, what stood out to me was how much Jane talked about collaboration and friendship. Jane was of course a co-founder of the LILAC conference back in 2005, alongside Debbi Boden-Angell. Both Jane and Debbi (in her recorded conference opening message) spoke about the importance of the people they’d worked with and the friendships they had made through LILAC. Jane also discussed IL advocacy, and how much you can achieve by talking to people about what is important to them. Which brings me neatly to my third theme…

Values

Many of the presentations at LILAC got me thinking about values-informed practice. What are our values as librarians, and how are these reflected in our work?

The very first talk I attended was Darren Flynn’s excellent presentation on information hinterlands. Based on his doctoral research into academic librarians and social class, Darren used the concept of hinterlands to explore how our past informs our present. “Hinterland” literally means behind-land, and Darren uses it as a metaphor to explore how our past shapes our approach to information, and what we bring with us when we “visit” a new information landscape. It got me thinking about what assumptions we make when working with information users who may have strikingly different backgrounds to our own. As Darren put it, the typical UK academic librarian was the middle-class child of Guardian-reading teachers (I am paraphrasing here…), a stereotype I absolutely fulfil! How has that shaped what we assume higher education to be for, how we understand the information landscape and what we assume the goals of an information-seeker in HE to be?

Elinor’s Carni’s Day 3 keynote also touched on values. In her jam-packed tour of data citizenship, Elinor discussed what motivates people to take action against big tech companies and try to control their own data. Among other things, understanding the human cost of digital harms is really important – these things are often quite abstract, and difficult to conceptualise unless you can put a human face on it. A recent example of this is the Horizon Post Office scandal, which has been known for years but leapt to public attention thanks to a TV series that dramatised this miscarriage of justice and showed the very real human harms it caused. Elinor’s keynote made me think about how important shared values are. Big tech companies rarely share our values as citizens. As Elinor noted, their business is to sell us adverts, and sell our data – they don’t care about us! What would values-informed data citizenship look like?

LILAC always attracts a large number of international delegates, particularly from the USA. I’ve always really enjoyed that about it, as it provides the opportunity to share knowledge and practice from around the world. This year, it was hard not to think of the additional challenges that our American colleagues are facing under their current administration. This came up again and again in conversations I had with US-based delegates: the restrictions they are already seeing on their work; their fears about whether they would be able to continue to research and practice in ways that were aligned with their values; even whether they would be able to travel in and out of their country safely in future. I also wonder how many US librarians weren’t at LILAC this year because they didn’t feel safe travelling.

Librarianship must be a values-informed profession, if we are to ensure fair and equitable access to information for all. This was really highlighted for me by Amanda Folk and Tracey Overbey’s excellent talk on decentering whiteness in information literacy. They noted that the harms of white supremacy don’t just disappear through well-meaning white people claiming not to “see colour”, for example (citing Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book Racism Without Racists, which went immediately on my reading list!). We have to be willing to address racism and anti-Blackness directly, and we can’t do that without discussing it openly. This is often uncomfortable work, particularly for white people who are usually unused to critically reflecting on race. However the stakes are much higher and the consequences much greater for our colleagues of colour, so it is on us white librarians to do the work! Amanda noted that as white people, we will make mistakes, but that we shouldn’t let the fear of making mistakes stop us from trying. Her advice was to do our own learning, approach conversations with humility, own our mistakes and learn from them.

Finally, in one of my favourite presentations of the conference, Joel Burkholder led a lively and thought-provoking discussion on defending information literacy in a politicised landscape. His timely argument was that in the current political climate (particularly in but not limited to the USA), where libraries are already the targets of authoritarianism through examples such as coordinated book-banning, how long is it until those in power come for information literacy? We have already seen how “DEI” has become a convenient target for right-wing authoritarians, much like “wokeness” and “critical race theory” (or the poorly-understood characterisations of them, at least) before it. Information literacy as a concept could also be seen as a threat to the authoritarian “strict father morality” which deals in moral absolutes and strictly enforced hierarchies.

Joel recommended George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics: How liberals and conservatives think, which has also gone onto my TBR pile! (You know it’s a good conference when you come away with a reading list…). I’m interested to find out more about the two paradigms Joel outlined in his presentation, which I believe are taken from this book: the “strict father morality”, which is typical of the right, and the “nurturant parent morality”, which is typical of the left. Joel argued that information literacy sits inherently within nurturant parent morality, through its focus on equity, social responsibility, open communication and care. I’m not 100% sure I agree with this: I think that’s the ideal of information literacy, but is that how it’s always practiced? Certainly some aspects of IL could be seen as fitting with strict father morality – such as educating people to use the “correct” sources (e.g. peer reviewed, authoritative according to a Western epistemic paradigm), which fits very well with the boundary and hierarchy policing of strict father morality. However, I do think that reflecting on our values and what we want to achieve through information literacy is very important for librarians, and framing devices like the strict father/nurturant parent can be very helpful for doing that.

Conclusions

This year’s LILAC has left me with lots to think about, read and digest. It was a demanding and tiring time this year – I’m going through some health problems at the moment which are causing me significant fatigue (hence I didn’t make it to any of the evening social stuff this year – apologies to everyone I missed on the dance floor!). However despite this, I still came away feeling energised and inspired.

In case this is useful to anyone else, here is my planned post-conference reading list! 

• Badke, W. (2011). Why information literacy is invisible. Communications in Information Literacy, 4(2), 129-141. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2011.4.2.92
• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism Without Racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
• Carmi, E.  & Nakou, P. (2023). What mobilises people against big-tech? City, University of London. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/31373/ 
• Gibson, A.N. and Martin, J.D. (2019), Re-situating information poverty: Information marginalization and parents of individuals with disabilities. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70: 476-487. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24128 
• Lakoff, G. (2016). Moral Politics: How liberals and conservatives think (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
• Magnus, E., Belanger, J., & Faber, M. (2018). Towards a critical assessment practice. In The Library With The Lead Pipe, (Oct), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/towards-critical-assessment-practice/ 
• Ovenden, R. (2020). Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack. John Murray Press.
• Stengel, R. (2019). Information Wars: How we lost the global battle against disinformation and what we can do about it. Grove Press.

My first, major update (and the one that’s occupying most of my thoughts and time right now) is that I have just accepted voluntary redundancy from my post as Subject Librarian at the University of Huddersfield. The University announced in May that it would be cutting 12% of staff across the whole university, meaning around 200 people were directly at risk of losing their jobs. The cuts affect the whole organisation, including academic staff and almost all professional service departments. The Library has been particularly hard hit, with the Subject Team in line to lose several staff, including two Subject Librarians.

I decided to volunteer for redundancy for a couple of reasons, the main one being that I could afford to do so. I’m not independently wealthy! But I am fortunate to have a roof over my head, no dependants to support, and a partner with a permanent job.

My second most important reason is that the redundancy consultation made me realise that I didn’t really want to be in the job any more. I’ve been there almost ten years, which feels like a long time to be in one post. I still enjoy the job, but I had already been feeling like I had achieved everything there that I wanted to, and considering moving on. The redundancy process itself has also made the university feel a less welcoming place to work. I have Thoughts about how the process has been conducted, which for the sake of my future employability I probably shouldn’t commit to writing! But suffice to say, while my line manager and all my colleagues have been fantastic, I have a real sense that from the higher levels of management, the work we do as a team is poorly understood and not valued.

And my third reason for volunteering was how viscerally I did not want to enter a competitive selection process against my colleagues. As mentioned above, I have Thoughts about some senior management decisions. But when it comes to my immediate colleagues, they are the best people I have ever worked with. One of the things that makes them so great to work with is that each of us has complementary skills and talents, and we all know each others’ strengths and how best to use them. Which also makes me incredibly angry about us being put in this position: I don’t believe those making the decisions appreciate what a valuable, cohesive and all-round badass team we are, and what an important resource to the university they are throwing away by pitting us against each other like that.

I am incredibly proud and humbled by the way that as a team, we did not allow ourselves to be set against each other. It would have been very easy I think for us all to hunker down and try to protect our own interests, but that never happened. One of the very first conversations we had as a team when the news came out was to try to work out if we could create a counter-proposal in which we all sacrificed some hours so that we could keep the same number of people in the team. In the end that wasn’t workable, but once I’d decided to volunteer for redundancy, we were able to come up with a solution that meant no one else had to lose their jobs. (In the end, one team member has taken another job offer, so ultimately we haven’t had to go down that route – but we came up with the proposal, and had it accepted).

Which leads me onto my next point: there really is strength in solidarity. On a micro level, as a team we worked together and helped each other through the process, and didn’t allow a “divide and rule” approach from senior management to take root. On a wider level, I am extremely grateful to the hard work of our representatives in Unison for negotiating hard on our behalf and securing a fairer redundancy package. If anyone reading this needs this prompt – join a union today!

So what next? I will be officially unemployed from 1 September 2024. This will be the first time in 24 years that I’ve ever been out of work, so I’m a little terrified at the prospect. But I’m also excited, because I’ve made the decision that rather than look for another job, I am going to switch to full-time mode on my PhD.

This will be a huge change for me. I have been studying part-time for the past two-and-a-bit years, so I am officially early in my second year. On that timescale, I would have another four years to go. Switching to full time from September will change my deadline to October 2026, just two years away.

Financially, it will be challenging. If I am very frugal, I think my redundancy pay will keep me going for about a year. I will also be looking for part-time work to supplement this. But I’ve decided that ultimately, I would rather commit to completing my PhD in two years, and make some sacrifices to get there, than slog through another four years of part-time study alongside a job I’m not sure I want and with the ever-present threat of future cutbacks hanging over my head.

I am excited for the opportunity to really immerse myself in my research. Although there are benefits to a part-time PhD, I’ve always found it challenging to switch between work mode and PhD mode. I often find that on my non-work days, I’ll be just getting on a roll – then I’ll have to break off and switch back to work-brain. By the time I am back on my PhD again, I’ve lost that momentum and have to start up again. So I am looking forward to seeing how immersing myself full-time in my research changes how I am able to think about it.

So those are my two major news items! I do have other news as well, which is also exciting but possibly slightly less dramatic than the above! The first is that, as of April, I am now co-Chair of CILIP’s Information Literacy Group (ILG). Myself and the magnificent Anne-Lise Harding have been co-deputies of the Group for a while, so now Jane Secker has decided to step down as leader we have stepped up into her role. (I’ve made this joke too many times I know, so apologies to anyone who has heard me say this before – but essentially, it takes two mere mortals to replace the legendary Dr Secker!). Jane is thankfully staying on for a year, she has basically swapped places with us so is now acting as Deputy Chair. So we have the benefit of Jane’s experience and mentorship for a while!

I am really excited to take on leadership of ILG alongside Anne-Lise. I’ve got so much out of my involvement with ILG over the past nine years, so I’m looking forward to seeing how we can steer the group ahead and continue Jane’s excellent work.

My other news is that I recently had a peer-reviewed article published! Co-authored with Laura Williams and published open access in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, it’s based on some user research we conducted into the reference management practices of various user groups at the University of Huddersfield. I haven’t really spoken about this much since it was published, largely because it was published the same day the redundancy consultation was announced at Huddersfield, so that rather overshadowed everything! But I’m really proud of the work we did on this, and I learned so much from the experience of collaborating with Laura on writing this article. I am going to write a separate blog post reflecting on the findings of this research as well as the process of writing it up, so stay tuned for that!

So to sum up: lots of change afoot right now. And to cap it all off, I turned 40 last week! The past six weeks have been turbulent and not always very much fun, but I feel better about everything now I know what’s ahead and I have a plan. Here’s to a new chapter!

This week was the second in-person event USTLG has held since the pandemic (the first was in May 2023, in Sheffield. I had planned to attend that one, but unfortunately had to cancel last minute as I had covid). I was so happy to be able to attend again – USTLG, as a fairly small group, is a really supportive environment and it’s always so valuable to hear from other librarians supporting STEM subjects.

I was presenting at this week’s event as well as attending: I gave a short presentation about my PhD research and progress so far. My slides from that presentation are on my research blog, if anyone is interested.

Fortunately, I was in the first speaking slot of the day – so for the rest of the day I was able to sit back and enjoy the rest of the day’s presentations! Below are my reflections and takeaways from the various talks.

Highs and lows of sci tech librarianship teaching

Emily Herron, from the University of Sheffield, gave a presentation where she reflected on her experiences as an engineering librarian, and how things have developed over time. She shared some context on the current subject support offered at Sheffield, which includes welcome talks, bespoke lectures and workshops embedded into courses, optional workshops and webinars offered throughout the year, and online tutorials and guides made available via the VLE. She also discussed recent developments, which as creating template feedback responses for lecturers to use when providing feedback on referencing or source use, which include links to support and guidance available from the library. I thought this was a really interesting idea, and would love to hear more about it.

Emily also reflected on some of the creative teaching methods she had used over the years, such as a “referencing washing line” game and creating Top Trumps cards for comparing different sources of information. These had mixed success – in particular the Top Trumps cards were very popular and generated lots of conversations, but she had also quickly found that not all students were familiar with Top Trumps and how to play!

Emily finished her presentation by opening the floor to discussions of generative AI and how we all felt this was impacting our roles. We had an interesting discussion about this. I didn’t note everything down, but the key points raised are outlined below.

From the discussion, it seemed that the most common query many of us currently get from students is how to reference ChatGPT (or equivalent tools). Most referencing styles now have guidance on how to reference generative AI content. However, I would argue that it is more important to reach students earlier in the process. If they’re asking how to reference it, then they’ve already used it – and have they done so in a responsible way that is suitable for their assignments?

We discussed the grey areas in AI use: for example, most academic integrity guidelines state that using generative AI to create your work is not acceptable, but what about using AI-augmented tools like Grammarly to “improve” your writing? Someone noted that this is like the distinction between copy-editing and proof-reading, which is a subtle one and not something that most students grasp easily. The challenge is not just in providing guidance/rules and policing AI use, but in helping students to understand what is or isn’t acceptable use in various contexts.

Some mentioned practical ways that their library was investigating AI use, for example experimenting with building their own chatbot trained on the library’s website, to answer routine queries (e.g. about opening hours or how to borrow a book). Others mentioned how they were using increasing awareness of AI as an opportunity to bring more critical IL into their library teaching, e.g. discussing the process of information creation.

A couple of useful resources were mentioned:

• MIT’s blog on artificial intelligence – not sure I noted down the details correctly, I think it may have been referring to this blog?
• AI Risk Measurement Scale (ARMS): A tool developed by the University of Greenwich to help teaching staff identify how vulnerable their assessments are to being completed using AI.

Why, not what: the role of the science and technical library in safety critical decision making

Paul Jones from TWI Global gave a fascinating talk about his experience at a specialist engineering research and consultancy organisation. In addition to maintaining an archive and library, TWI provides expert searching services, market intelligence, and horizon scanning to the organisation’s clients. Paul described their mission as enabling better safety decisions by ensuring information is reliable and discoverable.

What I was really struck by in Paul’s talk was how human-driven it all was. He discussed the institution’s own in-house thesaurus, maintained since the 1960s, and providing a controlled way to search for all aspects of the institution’s history and expertise. It’s the combination of detailed technical knowledge and search expertise that makes the information that TWI provides to its clients reliable.

It was interesting to consider this, in the context of our earlier discussions about AI! A similar point had also come up in the sponsor presentation, where Rosie Gibson from CAS had discussed the human-indexing and normalisation as a key selling point for CAS SciFinder. I understand that this approach is ever less common in information retrieval, as most databases use cheaper and more scalable automatic indexing, and more are now integrating AI and machine learning. There is something almost quaint about a human-indexed database – but it was really interesting to hear of these examples where that is still valued.

Tips and tricks for Science librarians

Eva Garcia Grau, Royal Holloway, shared the results of her Masters dissertation on effective approaches in STEM librarianship, and discussed her own experiences as a science librarian. She discussed how difficult she’d found things when she began her role at Royal Holloway, supporting courses such as Maths, Computer Science and Engineering – and how she’d started to feel as though she must be doing something wrong! That resonated with me, and judging from the wry laughs and nods in the room I don’t think I was alone with that. Sci tech librarianship is challenging, especially for those of us from arts and humanities or social science backgrounds (which I suspect is most of us), and it’s useful to share experiences this way.

Eva’s dissertation was a review of the literature on science librarianship. In reviewing the literature on subject librarianship generally, she categorised the subjects discussed along Becher & Trowler’s (2001) pure/applied, hard/soft classification of disciplines. She found that most of the literature focused on soft, applied disciplines (e.g. education, law), while the least focused on were hard, pure disciplines (e.g. maths, physics). She also noted that most published literature is about successful interventions – there are few articles like “I tried this thing and it totally didn’t work”! So it’s unsurprising that new science and technology librarians may struggle to find examples of what has worked in supporting these disciplines.

Eva found a number of barriers to integrating information literacy in STEM courses, all of which were familiar to me as things I’ve encountered in my own work. These included academic perceptions of librarians and of information literacy as being not relevant to their courses, lack of institutional support, librarians’ own lack of confidence and often lack of teaching experience, and one-shot teaching being timetabled at inappropriate times.

She noted that aligning IL instruction with specific disciplines seems to be more effective than providing generic IL teaching across all courses. An exception to this was American universities, where it is common to have an introductory module including IL teaching – this is usually compulsory and credit-bearing, but as these modules usually cover all courses then by their nature they have to be generic.

Eva closed with some recommendations for science and technology librarians:

• Speak the language of your discipline! “Information literacy” probably doesn’t mean much to the academics or students, so what disciplinary terminology can you adopt that gets the same point across?
• Become familiar with your disciplines. Be nosy: if you have access to the courses on the VLE, look at what assignments are set and when, what the marking criteria covers, what sorts of topics are of interest.
• Don’t try to do it all! Cramming everything into a one-shot session is counterproductive. What can you signpost to?
• Stop with the imposter syndrome! If you teach, you are a teacher (I loved this!)
• Build relationships with your academics, but don’t depend on just one – otherwise when they leave, you lose your access to their courses.

Doing research whilst working as a librarian

Finally, the closing session of the day was Kirsty Thomson from Dundee, who discussed doing research as a librarian – a topic very close to my heart!

Kirsty has been working, as part of her role with CILIP’s Library and Information Research Group (LIRG), on a research study into library workers’ experiences, skills and confidence in taking part in research. They are currently analysing data from their survey into this topic (which I’m pretty sure I responded to, so I was interested to see the results!). An early finding has been that of the people surveyed, most said they were interested in doing research – although Kirsty noted that this was a self-selecting sample so this may have biased the results in favour of those with some interest in research.

The barriers identified included lack of knowledge on certain aspects (applying for funding, completing ethics applications, and doing quantitative analysis were common areas mentioned), lack of time, and a feeling that research wasn’t for them. Kirsty did a bit of myth-busting on some of these, e.g. on the common refrain of “it’s not part of my job”, she noted that librarians are often involved in collective feedback from service users and making changes as a result – this is research!

Another regular comment was that respondents didn’t know how to go about doing a research project. Kirsty argued that most librarians probably have more transferable skills that are useful in doing research than we may realise – e.g. in literature searching, planning, project management, record keeping, data management. She also noted that in the survey, of all the specific research-related skills asked about, there was a proportion of respondents who said they were confident in that skill. So if you don’t have a particular skill yourself, there is probably someone in your team or network who does.

Kirsty recommended a few resources for people wanting to learn more about research, such as the LIRG lunchtime webinars on workplace research methods. I also flagged up a recent webinar from the Information Literacy Group’s New Professionals, who hosted a webinar with the editors of the Journal of Information Literacy about writing for publication. The recording of this webinar is on the ILG’s YouTube channel.

Conclusions and key takeaways

As always, the USTLG meeting was an incredibly valuable day with lots of great ideas to think about. I particularly enjoyed the various discussions abut AI throughout the day. I felt earlier this year like I was suffering from AI fatigue – so many conversations about the impact AI was likely to have on our work, but so few new ideas! However now we’ve lived with the reality of generative AI for a while, I’ve started to notice the conversations moving on a bit. It was useful at the meeting this week to have a general discussion about where we are with generative AI, and how our approaches are developing.

I also just really enjoyed meeting and talking with lots of other science and technology librarians. I’m looking forward to next year’s meeting, wherever that is held. I understand the group is also investigating holding online meetings in between the annual in-person meetup, so I am also looking forward to hearing more about these plans.

Navigating LILAC with a knee injury

I’m starting with this before getting into my learning points because honestly, it shaped my whole experience. I had a minor operation on my right knee at the start of March, which I am still recovering from. I thought I’d be more recovered than I was by the time LILAC came around, but it turns out that navigating a conference three weeks after knee surgery is HARD. I missed out on most of the social and networking side – largely because I skipped the two evening events in favour of icing my knee in my hotel room! But also because, with my mobility restricted, I couldn’t really circulate and seek people out during the lunch and coffee breaks the way I usually would. I noticed that despite skipping all the socialising, I was exactly as exhausted at the end of the conference as I would have been after my usual three days of busy networking and late nights! So I’m putting that down to the extra energy I’m expending in just getting around, plus the toll that healing takes on your body.

The other thing I feel is important to mention is pain. I don’t think I’d ever really grasped just how all-encompassing pain is. It is harder to concentrate, to be present and to think and discuss ideas when you are in constant pain. I also have a greater appreciation for accessibility challenges now! Although I’d like to hope I’ve always been reasonably well-attuned to the need for accessibility, knowing about the difficulty of navigating the world in a body that doesn’t quite do what you need it to is very different to actually living that experience.

I would like to say a massive thank you to the LILAC committee for working with me to make my experience at the conference as manageable as possible. As well as to everyone at LILAC who held open doors, patiently waited for me to make my slow and painful way into lecture theatres, and brought me cups of tea!

The importance of cake

And not just for the sugary energy boost required for three days of conferencing… Genuinely one of my major takeaways from this year’s LILAC was a metaphor used by Maha Bali, the day 2 keynote speaker. Her talk was absolutely brilliant, one of the best keynotes I think I’ve ever seen. I would strongly recommend reading through Maha’s slides, and there is a recording available of another conference talk she gave recently which she has described as “similar but not identical” to her LILAC keynote.

In Maha’s discussion on teaching critical AI literacy, she mentioned that she uses a baking metaphor to help students understand when it is appropriate to use AI and when not. She used three “levels” of cake-making to make her point: baking from scratch, using a box mix, or buying a ready-made cake. If a good friend has a big birthday celebration, then if you are a keen baker you might want to make them a cake from scratch. On the other hand, if you’ve never baked before then maybe this isn’t the time to experiment, and you’d be better off using a box mix to get the basic cake done, and then decorate it yourself to add a personal touch. Or maybe, if it’s an office party for someone you barely know but everyone has been asked to contribute some food, maybe you just buy a packet of Jaffa Cakes and call it a day.

Just as we accept that socially, all of these approaches are acceptable in different circumstances, so it is with AI. Doing something where the process doesn’t really matter and the output is low-stakes and simple? Use AI. If the process matters a bit and the output has to be more robust? Maybe use AI for the framework and then flesh out the details yourself. Doing something where you are being judged on both the process and the output, and both need to be high standard? Do it from scratch.

I love this metaphor as it’s easily graspable, and applicable in many different scenarios. Alice Cann on Bluesky pointed out that you could also add in points like whether the “ingredients” are important:

I also think it could be extended beyond just use of AI, to information literacy more broadly. This came up in a couple of other talks: in his day 3 keynote, Andy Walsh talked about compassionate pedagogy, and helping students to understand when a “least effort” approach can be enough, rather than terrifying them into thinking if they’re not doing a fully Booleaned-up systematic search then they’re doing it wrong. In their excellent panel discussion on social class, Darren Flynn, Rosie Hare. Jennie-Claire Crate, Ramona Naicker and Andrew Preater also discussed helping students who may come in with less experience of academic conventions (e.g. if they are the first in their family to attend university) by helping them to identify the shortcuts that are acceptable to use.

Challenging our assumptions

Speaking of the social class panel, that was probably one of my favourite sessions of the conference. There are some great provocations on the Padlet that was shared before the session, and I believe the panel plans to blog some reflections and responses to the points raised.

One early point was about how important it is to incorporate critical theory into our work in order to support social justice. On the Padlet, several people had commented along the lines that they felt critical theory was too complex, requiring “fancy terminology”, and was irrelevant to students’ needs in an information literacy classroom. The panel pushed back on this, arguing that a) you don’t need to have read all the books on critical theory and be able to quote Marx at the drop of a hat to be able to bring criticality into your practice; and b) suggesting that critical theory is irrelevant to working-class students’ experiences suggests that you don’t think that issues of power structures and systemic injustice are important. The panel suggested that the idea of critical theory being too complex or difficult to address in an IL setting could be an excuse to hide behind! They noted that using critical theory in practice means things like interrogating your own assumptions, promoting critical thinking skills, and questioning what information sources you use/promote. They’re not suggesting librarians need to open IL classes with a lecture on Paolo Freire!

On a practical note, I picked up lots of useful and thought-provoking ideas from this session that I intend to put into practice. One was about using words like “obviously” – I’m sure I say this a lot, it’s one of my verbal tics! But as Ramona pointed out, calling something “obvious” is really othering for people who don’t already know about that thing. That really struck a chord with me, so I’m going to aim to scrub that word from my vocabulary! From the audience, Jess Haigh also noted that in inductions, it is really helpful to directly address the library anxiety that many students have (this won’t be limited to working class students, but may well be more common among this group). She said she will often say explicitly “you may have come from a school or college where the library was somewhere you sent if you were naughty, that doesn’t happen here”! Darren agreed, and said that it’s much better to include helpful pointers like this than the usual quasi-marketing talk about how old the university is and how many books are in the library – students generally don’t care about this information, but if anything it’s likely to be intimidating for those who are new to academic environments.

Elsewhere, another favourite session was Becky Scott’s talk on using narrative inquiry. I LOVED this talk, and would be fascinated to see more of her research! She talked a little about how her research approach involved countering some expectations of what academic research outputs look like, particularly when it comes to publishing. The research outputs being produced are in the form of poetry – Becky read one of the poems she’d written based on one of her interviews, and it was wonderful. I love the idea of using poetry to create a true reflection of what an interviewee has said and what they meant. It got me thinking about what we think research looks like, and how creative research methods can challenge this.

Reading

Finally, another theme that came up a few times was the importance of teaching people how to read. Now given that the audience of this conference is predominantly higher education librarians, we weren’t talking about basic literacy! But more, how to help HE students learn the skills needed to read academic works.

In my wonderful colleague Zoë Johnson’s workshop, we discussed in groups various questions including: do we see a decline in reading at our institutions? How are students taught to read academic texts, and whose responsibility is this? Does format (ebook, audiobook, or standard paper book) matter?

We discussed a number of points including, where does teaching the skills for academic reading fit into the curriculum? University lecturers often bemoan their students not having learned these skills at school or college, but where would teachers fit these in? My own opinion on this is that I think it’s unhelpful to complain about what knowledge students do or don’t have when they arrive at university. Until someone invents a time machine, we have to teach students at the level they arrive with, so what is the best way to do that?

We also discussed the shift to ebook-first models that many university libraries now follow, and how this may have impacted student reading. Although the promise of ebooks was that they offered a flexible and cost-effective approach to collection development, in practice the experience of reading a library ebook is so poor that most students simply don’t use them.

In another session, led by Tasha Cooper and Alison McKay from UWE Bristol, we participated in an academic reading circle (ARC). The idea of an ARC is that in groups, everyone reads the same article, but each person takes a different role and reads through that lens. The roles are flexible, but the three we used in this session were the Visualiser, who creates a visual representation such as a mind-map of the article; the Connector, who follows up links or references in the article, or looks up other information or related concepts; and the Facilitator, who gets the discussion going and thinks of questions to ask.

We each picked our roles, then read a short journal article on media literacy and body image. Then each of the “roles” got together with others of the same role (i.e. all of the Facilitators together, etc.) to discuss what we had picked up on from the article. Then we went back into our groups of three (consisting of one Visualiser, one Connector and one Facilitator) and had group discussions about the article.

I really enjoyed doing this, and can see how it would be really helpful for students in developing their reading skills. I had initially assumed that this was an activity that the presenters used with researchers and/or academics in their institution, but I was mistaken – they actually do this with undergraduates, mostly first years, in health care and social work courses. I love this idea and am thinking about how I could introduce something similar with my own students.

Concluding thoughts

Overall, I have lots to think about from LILAC this year. Although my restricted mobility meant it was quite a different experience than usual, I really got a lot out of it. The programme this year was fantastic, I’ve only mentioned here a couple of standouts, but I learned something useful from every session I attended!

I’m looking forward to LILAC 2025 in Cardiff! Hopefully by then I will a) be able to get around easier (and get back on the dance floor at the conference dinner!) and b) have some early insights to share from my PhD, for which I start data collection in the autumn term of 2024-25.

Visualising online search processes

This was an absolutely fascinating presentation. It was highly visual and sadly I didn’t think to take any photos, but will do my best to describe it!

Luca Botturi, from the Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, has been part of a team that developed a visualisation technique for analysing search behaviours. The team gave a group of 16-20 year old participants search tasks to conduct in their own time, on their own devices, with browser software installed to track their searches. The search scenarios were all topics that would require exploration, e.g. a friend has heard that basil is carcinogenic, would you advise them to eat pesto or not based on the information you can find? (As an aside, I love how incredibly Italian that search task is…) Some tasks were open (multiple possible answers), some closed (only one correct answer). Alongside recording their search activities through the browser software, students were asked to provide their answer (which was marked and scored for accuracy), and give a rationale of how they came to that answer.

The software recorded what terms had been searched for, how many different searches were conducted, how long the student spent on the results page, what they clicked on, and how many items they clicked on. This resulted in a visual representation of typical patterns of search, making visible what is usually opaque.

Luca shared examples of some of the search pattern visualisations on screen, and I was struck by how easy to “read” they were. They represented lots of complex information, but once you knew what the bars and colours referred to, it was easy to see the difference between, for example, someone who types in lots of variations on a search term but never leaves the results page, relying on the snippets/summaries to inform them; and someone who does one search, clicks on a couple of results and spends a bit of time reading them, then comes back and searches again, having used the first information they find to refine their search. I’m hoping the slides from this presentation will be shared online, and if they are I will come back and update this post with a link.

As well as analysing the search patterns themselves, the team also brought the visual patterns back to the class to share with the students, and used them to help the students reflect on their search practices. Luca noted that people often don’t know what other ways of searching exist as they never see others do it, so this was valuable for broadening students’ understandings of how search could work. Seeing each other’s search techniques enabled them to learn from each other, as well as reflect on how they were searching and why.

One key finding was that among the secondary school students in the sample, the most common search pattern was staying on the search page, using the previews to gain info rather than clicking on the results. This often led to students encountered misleading or decontextualised information. However most still managed to come up with good answers to the questions. The researchers also noted that most of the searches were very fast – the average time spent on one query was just nine seconds to come up with an answer! This surprised the researchers as many of the search scenarios were complex questions, however in most cases the participants were able to answer them adequately even with very little time spent on information gathering.

The main conclusion from the research was that searching is extremely varied and personal, and there is no optimal method for doing so. There was no correlation between patterns of search and scores on the answers. However using a variety of methods for different needs may be beneficial, and users may learn new techniques and develop their own skills by observing others. Seeing that your peers are doing things differently is likely to be more effective than being taught “better” techniques by librarians or teachers.

School libraries project in Kazakhstan

In one of the last sessions I attended at the conference, Yelizaveta Kamilova and Zhuldyz Orazymbetova from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan discussed a project they had been involved in to develop media and information literacy knowledge among school librarians in Kazakhstan. They noted that in Kazakhstan, there is a lack of national policy or materials to do with information literacy, and what is available internationally is usually in English which is not widely spoken among the population (Kazakh and Russian are the most common languages).

This project, carried out with very minimal funding, involved delivering online and in-person training workshops to school librarians across the country, as well as workshops delivered directly to schoolchildren. The team reached more than 800 librarians and 2,500 children through their workshops! They also produced a media and information literacy “manual” to share with librarians, and built a Google site to host this and all the workshop materials online.

I was incredibly impressed with the scope of this project, and the amount they had managed to achieve with so little funding. The authors also noted that although in Kazakhstan librarians are considered administrative staff rather than teaching staff, they took the initiative to apply for a teaching award for the project at their own university – and won! So one consequence of the project has been to raise their profile within their academic institution, and gain recognition for the pedagogic knowledge and skills of librarians more broadly.

Recognising the discipline of information literacy

In a panel discussion, Clarence Maybee, Karen Kaufmann, Bill Johnston, and Sheila Webber discussed the implications of recognising information literacy as a distinct academic discipline. The panel are working on a book in the topic, due to publish in 2025.

I live-posted this panel on Mastodon, so my immediate notes from this session can be viewed on my Wakelet. Here, I wanted to highlight some of my thoughts from the panel, having reflected on it for a little longer.

I’d heard some of these ideas discussed before, in a presentation by Karen Kaufmann at LILAC in 2022. The panel format at ECIL was valuable for bringing together varied perspectives on the topic. All four of the panellists come from different academic and practice backgrounds, and have differing perspectives on what they consider important in the disciplinary focus of information literacy.

I particularly agree with a couple of the points that Sheila made (and I’m not just saying that because she’s my PhD supervisor!). Naming IL as our discipline and taking ownership allows us to carve out our space in the crowded research landscape. When I’m talking to academics at my institution about my PhD research, I make a point of referring to information literacy as the discipline I’m working within, because it is a field with its own evidence base and body of knowledge, and it seems to me important to articulate that. I also liked Sheila’s point about acknowledging our own discipline positions us to be able to take advantage of emerging research areas (the concept of “AI literacy” being a particularly pertinent one at the moment!).

What shapes our trust in scientific information

In an incredibly thought-provoking presentation, Armin Jacob and Lennart Perrey, from the ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany, discussed what informs the reader’s opinion of how “scientific” a paper appears to be. They noted that a piece of work can have the characteristics of “scientificness” without actually being accurate, and this is relevant to discussions of mis- and disinformation.

The team conducted a literature search to identify the characteristics of “scientific perception”, and identified the following characteristics:

• Presence of formulae.
• Use of tables, figures and diagrams.
• Language, e.g. complex terminology, passive voice (but this may not always have the same effect, depends on subject matter and audience).
• Formatting (e.g. two-column layout is more scientific than single column!).
• Author names, e.g. titles, institutional affiliations.
• Includes references (but the reader will not check these!).

The authors acknowledged the limitations of this review: the concepts of credibility and trust are very complex, therefore it is hard to measure the effects. Something that appears trustworthy to one person may appear less so to another, based on the same elements.

They closed by noting that these elements are all easily manipulated to intentionally add a veneer of credibility to pseudoscience and/or disinformation. I’ve definitely seen this – I have a colleague at the university who is very interested in a particular conspiracy theory. He has often contacted me to help assess the credibility of papers that adherents of this conspiracy claim as evidence for their assertions, and this kind of “scientific-ish” presentation strikes me as quite common in this field. It’s fascinating to me how much the presentation impacts how we understand the content of a piece of media – the point about a two-column layout being seen as “more scientific” than a single column was a brilliant example of this!

The relationship between videogame literacy and information literacy

Sheila Webber, from the University of Sheffield, drew on her own research and that of some of her Masters students to investigate the IL dimensions within videogame literacy. She noted that much of the research on games and IL looks at using games as a teaching method for IL, but she was interested instead in how IL appears within gaming experience.

She started with a definition of videogame literacy. This has three components:

• Operational literacy: ability to play the game (e.g. navigate the interface, understand the rules).
• Cultural literacy: understanding the game in its technical context, within the world of gaming (e.g. genre), and within the wider cultural world (e.g. Harry Potter).
• Critical literacy: social, economic and political context of the games and players, e.g. censorship, inclusion/representation.

IL is currently not considered as a component of VGL, but Sheila believes it is present in each of the three aspects above, but hidden. E.g.:

• Operational: IL appears in combining information from many sources to make decisions and get better at the game.
• Cultural: IL dimension includes using the conventions of the game, understanding cultural references.
• Critical: IL involved in understanding power structures, how information about the game is created and presented.

This was such an interesting perspective, and one I’d not encountered before. I really like these kinds of explorations of how information literacy can be viewed in non-educational contexts. I suspect many librarians might not consider that a person playing a videogame is engaged in information literacy, but I think Sheila argued very persuasively for how they could be seen to be doing so.

The library helpdesk as a pedagogical tool

Liv Inger Lamoy and Astrid Kilvik, from the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, discussed a research project conducted at their university to analyse use of in-person and virtual reference services provided by the library. This was partly to evaluate the use of their virtual reference service, launched during covid lockdown and now a permanent part of the library’s services.

To evaluate the service, they interviewed users of the virtual service and visitors to the help desk; used “guerrilla” interviews around campus as a method to reach non-users of the service; and analysed statistics regarding the number and types of queries received at both the virtual and physical reference desks.

One thing that surprised me was how little used the virtual helpdesk was compared to the physical desk. From Jan-Apr 2023 there were just 183 queries via the digital service, compared to 84,406 questions received at the physical desk! However, the types of questions received at each location was different. On the virtual service, most questions were about referencing and study advice, whereas the face-to-face helpdesk got mostly questions about loans, collections and access. Another difference was about the surroundings. In interviews, users of the digital service noted that they valued it for being able to ask questions in an unhurried, undisturbed way, contrasting this with the physical help desk where they were often aware of other people queueing so felt they couldn’t spend much time there.

I was interested in this session because like many libraries, my own service has been considering how to balance in-person help with online help services, introduced during covid and now part of our standard practice. I was a little unsure from the presentation if the virtual service was offered on an appointment basis or “on demand” – I got the impression that it was on-demand, as the presenters discussed staffed hours for the service which implied to me that the staff are waiting for calls/chats to come in “live” rather than pre-booked. That’s a route we haven’t gone down in my library: we offer online appointments, but not a drop-in online service (though we still get drop-in face-to-face queries at the helpdesk).

I like the idea of complementing the data collection with interviews to find out more about what users of the service thought of it, and I really like the sound of the “guerrilla interviews” as a way to reach non-users.

Collaboration between librarians and academics following a library reorganisation

Tayo Nagasawa, from Åbo Akademi University in Finland, discussed the implications of a library restructure on developing working relationships with academics in the university. The restructure in 2018 had used an embedded, functional model, meaning that library teaching roles were separated from academic liaison.

The research used semi-structured interviews with librarians to examine the the existence of social networks between librarians and academics, and the nature of information sharing in these networks. They found that following the restructure, librarians who design and deliver library inductions and teaching no longer had direct contact with academics. It had been felt that the library induction and teaching sessions were generic enough to be developed centrally, without input from Schools/departments. However the consequence of this was that information sharing no longer took place between academics and librarians, although an internal tutor training programme organised by the SU provided an opportunity for some indirect sharing between librarians and student tutors.

I found this presentation really telling about the perhaps unanticipated consequences of restructuring a department! I would have liked more discussion about the implications of these findings, and what their next steps might be – I wasn’t clear what the outcome of this research was, e.g. if the institution is revisiting the library structure as a result. But I really liked the idea of a relationship-mapping exercise, to see what networks exist and how information is shared.

Incorporating SIFT into one-shot workshops

As part of a Pecha Kucha session, Rebecca Hastie from the American University of Sharjah, UAE, talked about how she uses the SIFT method for evaluating sources in her one-shot workshops. To use the framework in such a short time, Rebecca introduces all four “moves” but focuses on “Stop” and “Investigate” with an activity. These workshops take place in a computer room, with around 20ish students. After presenting the whole SIFT framework, students are given a shared Google doc with links to articles on various topics. In pairs, students pick one article from the list and work in pairs to SIFT it for 10 minutes, focusing on the first two stages. After the ten minutes, the session closes with a whole-class discussion on one of the links chosen.

I was really interested to see how Rebecca was using SIFT, as it’s a tool I also use in my one-shot classes. I find it a lot more effective than CRAAP, which I think is quite outdated as an evaluation method. I was jealous that she gets to run workshops with such small groups – I would love to do an activity like this, but as my groups are usually 100+, and in a lecture theatre rather than a computer room, it’s not really doable! I am going to try to adapt this activity for some of my smaller classes though – I do have a couple of smallish groups this could potentially work with.

I have a lot of notes and a lot of thoughts about the conference, so I am going to split this into a few separate posts. In this first post, I will reflect on the four keynote sessions.

This is the first conference I’ve attended since quitting Twitter, which was a challenge for me as I usually use Twitter to live-post the keynotes, as well as connecting with other attendees. I had a go this time at live-“tooting” on Mastodon instead. I’m not totally sure how successful that was! I was the only person posting on the #ECIL2023 hashtag on Mastodon, so I didn’t make any connections with other attendees that way. However, I did check on Twitter a couple of times and there wasn’t much activity on the hashtag there either, so I just don’t think that was a channel many people were making use of.

I still found it useful to live-post as that is my method of note-taking in keynotes! I find it a useful exercise for picking out the key points quickly, so from that perspective I did still think it was helpful to do. If interested, you can see my live posts from the keynotes, as well as one panel discussion, on Wakelet.

As a four-day conference, ECIL had four keynotes – a lot to take in! I was really impressed by both the quality and variety of the keynotes. They all covered different angles, and each gave me different things to think about.

Keynote One: Tim Gorichanaz

Day 1 was opened by Tim Gorichanaz, who spoke about the ethical foundations of information literacy. I was really keen to see Tim speak as I’ve been reading a lot of his work on information experience lately for my PhD! He gave a keynote that was both inspiring and thought-provoking. He talked about the rapid development in information and communication technology, and the effect that this could have on society, both positive and negative. He argued for a sound ethical basis for information literacy, to ensure we are not building on crumbling foundations.

Tim discussed various ethical approaches that have appeared in LIS literature, which mostly come from the philosophical approaches of deontology (duties and rules for the “right” thing to do); or consequentialism (calculating the “rightness” of outcomes, e.g. the trolley problem). He argues that an older ethical approach, virtue ethics, may be more suitable for information ethics. Virtue ethics focuses on doing the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time. Rather than focusing on long-term consequences which are often hidden from view, the focus is on doing the best you are able to do in the situation you find yourself in. Tim set out seven practices for cultivating virtue that we could all embed in our professional practice.

I really loved this discussion: it was just what I needed to set me up for four days of conferencing! I appreciated the reminder to go back to our values and ethical principles as a profession, to better equip us to deal with a changing technological environment.

Keynote Two: Jenna Hartel

Jenna Hartel opened day two with a keynote that was entertaining, eye-opening and thought-provoking. She introduced herself as a tour guide to the “Archipelago of Library and Information Science”: the “islands” of research areas that are visible from the “mainland” of LIS. Some close by and already well-explored, such as the islands of Embodiment and Contemplation; others further away and more challenging to connect back to LIS, such as the islands of Multiple Perspectives, Love, and Psychedelia.

I adored Jenna’s keynote! Although I find it hard to see how psychedelic information could be a research goal for LIS without advocating the use of recreational drugs (although I would love to see the ethics application for that research…), I really appreciate the provocation of thinking about concepts you wouldn’t necessarily expect to connect to LIS research. Jenna has an excellent YouTube channel which is well worth exploring. She shared the below video on the crossroads of information and love during the session as an illustration of some of her ideas.

Keynote Three: Alison Hicks

On day 3, Alison Hicks used her keynote to reflect on the sociocultural turn in LIS research. She noted that this year marks 18 years since the publication of Tuominen, Savolainen & Talja’s landmark paper “Information literacy as a sociotechnical practice”. So as the concept of sociocultural IL reaches adulthood, Alison used citation analysis of this paper to explore how the concept has entered the discourses of IL research, and what gaps remain to be explored.

My notes on the themes Alison identified from her citation analysis are in my Wakelet. I just wanted to pick up on one point that stood out to me: Alison cautioned that while the sociocultural approach has opened up new areas for exploration of information behaviour in context, there is a risk of “itemisation” of IL contexts, as researchers compete to present information literacy practices in ever more niche and specific contexts. She suggested that research needs to move beyond merely documenting the shape of IL experiences in different sociocultural contexts. As my own research is exploring a specific niche of information behaviour (that of female engineering undergraduates), this is a warning I should probably take to heart!

Keynote Four: Sabina Cisek and Monika Krakowska

The final keynote was from Sabina Cisek and Monika Krakowska, both from Jagiellonian University, Krakow (our conference hosts!), on the methodological and interdisciplinary aspects of information experience and information culture. Sabina and Monika made an excellent double act, presenting a very useful outline of the current landscape of information experience research, including how it crosses over related fields. I was glad to learn I’m not the only one who finds the boundaries between information literacy, information practice, information behaviour and information experience to be somewhat fuzzy!

One point Sabina highlighted was that a lot of research in information experience doesn’t draw from or cite key papers in information behaviour. She felt this was a weakness, as there is a robust body of work in information behaviour that could help researchers avoid repetition or reinventing the wheel. I would also add to this that information literacy also has its own, well-established research tradition – I think there is a risk of these competing schools of thought within LIS becoming siloed.

Summary

The four keynotes together worked brilliantly for setting the scene for the conference as a whole. Each keynote separately presented a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the discipline, and the combination of all four keynotes worked really well to provide an overview of current state of information literacy research.

I should preface this by saying that I don’t actually think any of the potential alternatives are the “new Twitter”. It could be that a true Twitter replacement has yet to emerge – but I think it’s more likely that a platform exactly like Twitter isn’t really viable any more. So I think it’s more about looking at what alternatives exist, and considering what it is you actually want from a social media platform. For me, that is: a place where I can express my professional identity (as a librarian and a researcher), but not be too professional. Where I can have a laugh with my friends, find new interesting people to chat with and learn from, and also share pictures of and anecdotes about my cat.

Legacy social media

First up: what I am calling the “legacy” platforms. These are old stalwarts that have been around for a while, for good or bad, and that I already have accounts on. For me, this is Facebook and Instagram.

I find Facebook pretty much unusable these days. I don’t actually use it in any active way: I am purely there to maintain contact with a few family members, and for a couple of groups that still use Facebook as their platform. So this is a non-starter for me.

I have an Instagram account, but I haven’t posted there in more than six months. I rarely go there to see what other people have posted either. I probably should reinvestigate this – but even if I do dip my toe back in that water, I don’t think it’s a Twitter replacement for me. Instagram is pretty much wholly a personal network for me, not a professional one. I also don’t like how hard it is to share other people’s posts. One of the things I value most about Twitter is seeing interesting things other people have shared that I wouldn’t have found myself, and adding my own commentary to things I find interesting. That is hard to do on Instagram, so it’s not a feasible substitute for me.

The new platforms

Various new (and not so new…) platforms have emerged recently as potential competitors to Twitter. The three I am most aware of are Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon.

As mentioned in my last post, I did sign up to Threads when it launched. And I immediately HATED it. My main gripe was that there is no way to only see the people you follow – you just have an algorithmically-generated feed, which might show you some of your friends but will mostly show you (as far as I could see) brands, celebrities, and shitty comedy accounts. I understand a “following” feed is now available on Threads, but the fact that the launch was optimised for advertisers and influencers rather than for people just wanting to talk to each other really gives me a bad feeling about the platform (and I’m not alone in that assessment). I haven’t deleted my account yet, but I also haven’t been there since launch day. So I think that, for me, this is probably a dead end.

I’ve fairly recently joined BlueSky (thanks to an invitation from a pal – I do have a couple of invitations to share now if anyone wants one!). I haven’t been there long, and to be honest I haven’t invested much time into exploring it. So far my impressions are: it’s ok? I don’t think there are really enough people there posting regularly to make it worthwhile for me, and I am not finding it easy to find new, interesting people to follow. I will probably stick around there and see if I can figure it out a bit more, e.g. spend more time exploring the “feeds” (custom algorithms that allow you to control what gets shown to you, beyond the people you already follow).

So that leaves Mastodon! Which, for all its flaws, I really, really like. It feels a lot like Twitter used to, back when I first joined it, when it was just a bunch of nerds chatting. Some of my beloved Twitter pals are there, but I’ve also met some super interesting new people. My feed is refreshingly free of spam and hate speech (which should be a low bar, but…). Instead it’s a mix of cute pet pics, cool ideas and fun facts. The main things I feel are missing are the ability to quote posts (one thing I thought Threads got right!), and search beyond just hashtags. I understand there are good reasons for limiting both of these as vectors for harassment, but I really miss being able to add my thoughts to something I am reposting, and I keep forgetting to bookmark posts I wanted to come back to later.

Generally though, the functionality of Mastodon is very good, and has some lovely features (like content warnings! And the ability to edit posts!) that are missing from other platforms. And while I understand that some people are put off by the complexity of first setting up an account, I think the difficulties in selecting an instance and server are overstated, tbh. (If there is interest in this, I might write a “how to use Mastodon” post at some point, although I think there are plenty of posts out there like that already so I am wary of adding to the noise!) So I think Mastodon is likely to be my primary social media for the foreseeable.

Return of the blogosphere?

My final thought on this: is it time to resurrect the blogosphere? I started this blog way back in May 2009, and at the time there was a thriving network of other library and library-adjacent blogs. I used to post here regularly, and comment on other blogs regularly, and you’d get a good conversation going in the comments of various blogs sometimes. Gradually the conversations about the blog posts moved to Twitter, and soon after that the blog posts ground to a halt as well. Writing a blog post takes time and effort, and feels like talking to yourself: it was easier to have a conversation on Twitter and get immediate feedback, than spend time on long-form writing.

But was moving all of our conversations onto a centralised social media platform, at the mercy of capitalists who do not understand the value of talking and will be all too ready to dismantle the platforms and sell them for parts, a mistake? (I realise the irony of posting this on WordPress, another centralised platform!). This is one of the things I value about Mastodon: it is decentralised, which makes it more vulnerable as a platform in some ways, but also less vulnerable to the inevitable enshittification.

I enjoyed this post on Mastodon:

I would love it if the demise of Twitter brought about a resurgence in blogging again! I’ve also noticed recently that there are some reasonable RSS readers available now – something I thought was long dead with the demise of Google Reader (RIP, yes I am still angry about it).

So, where is everyone else heading? Anyone feeling curious about Mastodon and want some advice? If you’ve tried out BlueSky, what do you think of it? And is anyone else dusting off their old blogs and getting back to long-form posting?

Twitter has long been my social media of choice. I joined way back in the mists of 2009, when I was just a baby librarian. As an elder millennial, I’ve seen plenty of social media sites come and go, but Twitter has been my longest-standing network. I’ve made friends there, as well as professional contacts. I’ve shared my personal challenges, and got support from people I knew in person, people I only knew online, and kind strangers. I’ve had ideas for work projects, and guidance on growing my own vegetables from Twitter. I regularly learn about breaking news by reverse-engineering the jokes about it that I see on Twitter. As much as anything has been, Twitter is my online home.

So to say I am angry about it’s wanton destruction at the hands of an angry manchild who has not been told “no” enough in his life, is an understatement. Twitter, for all its problems, has been a net good in my life, along with countless others. And now it’s dying because the Landlord of Mars has surrounded himself with people who are too scared to tell him his ideas are terrible?

I’ve tried exploring other social networks. I’ve been on Mastodon for a while (come and say hi!), and I like it – but I miss my Twitter pals, not all of whom have made it there! I set up a Threads account when it launched, and immediately hated it: no way to just see the people I’d followed, endless brands and celebrities screaming in my face. So I keep returning to Twitter – because my network is already there, because it’s familiar, and because live-posting from conference hashtags on Mastodon feels intrusive and unwelcome.

I’m aware though that these aren’t great reasons to stay! When the World’s Most Divorced Man is emboldening the worst people on the platform, creating an increasingly toxic and unsafe environment for marginalised communities, shouldn’t we vote with our feet? Twitter is a sinking ship, we don’t have to stay on it as it goes down.

Today, when I checked my phone this morning, I spotted that the comforting, familiar blue bird was gone, replaced by the meaningless (and shoddy-looking) X. I had an almost visceral reaction to this – what has happened to the happy bird that allowed me to talk to my pocket friends?? So I did something I should have done a long time ago: I deleted Twitter from my phone.

Now, I realise this is only a half-measure. I’m not deleting my Twitter account just yet: mainly because I don’t want to lose my username, or all my contacts there! I’m still hoping some of you will follow me to Mastodon . I also look after my workplace’s social media accounts, including Twitter, so will have to stick around for that reason too.

But I pretty much won’t be posting or reading on Twitter any more. I plan to blog more often, so will still auto-share my blog posts to Twitter. And I guess I’ll check every so often for messages and replies. But taking it off my phone pretty much ensures I’ll only check every few days or so, which should work pretty well to help me kick the Twitter habit!

And so, although I am still referring to it as Twitter and probably always will, in one sense I do agree with Phony Stark: Twitter is now (my) X.