Peter Cruickshank, Marina Milosheva and I have just delivered the final report on the impacts of information literacy (IL) research on society. It’s available on the Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA) website. That post contains the executive summary, and a link to the full report. The report will also soon be available on my Napier web-page, and is already available in my publication list on this blog.

Peter, Marina and I are very grateful to Stéphane Goldstein of MILA for his support of and patience with this work. We are also grateful to CILIP and the CILIP Information Literacy Group for funding the project. For reasons beyond our control, the project started 6 months later than planned, and so had to be fitted around other commitments – including Marina’s thesis-writing! I am personally very grateful to Marina and Peter for their work. They are super-intelligent people, and fun to work with!

So what have I learnt from this project? Not to give up hope – decent project sponsors do understand that ‘stuff happens’. It seems I can juggle simultaneous academic projects successfully. (I should have had that down pat from my former career as a production manger in educational publishing, but 10 years of being away from that, able to do things at my own pace, took the edge off.)

The skill I clearly need to develop is avoiding falling down rabbit holes. One of the first papers in the full review was Johnson and Jent (2007). When I realised that this was part of an annual series, I spent a day looking at the whole series. (See appendix 3 of the full report.) I believe that treating this series as a single review-object added to our work. It provided further evidence about where IL research takes place, and how different types of libraries are (and aren’t) covered in such research. But was this addition worth a full day’s work? I suspect not, but perhaps – if the review publicises this amazing series further – it was worthwhile after all.

Another rabbit-hole that isn’t even mentioned in the report was mapping where authors of Journal of Information Literacy work, and where their work covers.

So the moral of the story is that I can lead academic projects, but I still have a few procrastination-tweaks to make.

References

Johnson, A. M., & Jent, S. (2007). Library instruction and information literacy 2005. Reference Services Review, 35(1), 137–186. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907320710729427

Ryan, B., Milosheva, M., & Cruickshank, P. (2023). ‘Information Literacy and Society’ final project report. MILA. https://mila.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ILS-final-project-report-AS-PUBLISHED.bmrV2_.pdf