I was delighted to take part in this event run by Young Scot (YS) and the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP). Here, I say a little about the event but more about my thoughts and contributions. I look forward so much to the research this event was based on being published.
Continue readingDuring my recent research into how school librarians can help students with mis- and disinformation issues, I learnt that four local authorities (Argyll & Bute, Glasgow, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire) either had, or soon would have, no secondary school librarians. Also, Fife is continuing to cut its school library services. In this case, I’m pleased to learn that the UNISON Union and CILIPS are campaigning against these cuts, and for improvements to school library services.
Continue readingAt midnight on Friday 31 October, my Napier laptop locked me out, telling me that my account had expired. This wasn’t a malfunction: I had just transmuted from a Senior Research Fellow to a Senior Visiting Fellow.
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On Thursday 9 October, I attended this panel event at the Scottish Parliament. It took place in banned books week. This post is based on my brief notes of what was said. I apologise if I have misrepresented anyone.
The event was hosted by Michelle Thomson MSP, introduced by Sean McNamara (CILIPS director) and chaired by David McMenemy (CILIPS President). The panellists were Cleo Jones (former CILIPS president and former Edinburgh libraries development manager), Shelagh Toonen (CILIPS vice-president), Alastair Brian (The Ferret) and Professor Steven Buchanan.
Continue readingA call from a former Napier colleague, Marina Milosheva
Calling all students, parents and teachers!
Did you know that playing card games can help you with your career?
Join us on Monday 13th October in Glasgow for a fun, free event as part of the Festival of Social Science:
Bridging Skills for Working Lives: Exploring Career-Ready Skills Through the Card Game of Bridge
What you’ll do:
• Hear career stories from financial advisers, IT specialists, and science teachers
• Learn to play the card game bridge
• Meet new people and get inspired!
Event details:
📅 Monday 13th October, 3:30–6 pm (first day of half-term week)
📍 Clyde Bridge Centre, Centura Court, 4 Nasmyth Rd, Hillington, Glasgow G52 4PR
🎫 FREE, including pizza, snacks and travel bursaries
Register today: https://festivalofsocialscience.com/events/bridging-skills-for-working-lives/
I’m very happy that the project report on ‘Tackling misinformation and disinformation for Scottish school librarians’ is now published on the CILIPS website. It feels like it’s been a long time coming, but very worthwhile. In this work, I researched the ‘how, why and what could/should be’ of Scottish school librarians’ work to help pupils become better able to handle mis- and disinformation.
The report now has a digital object identifier, 10.17869/enu.2025.4736738. Hence it is now also available via the Napier repository at https://napier-repository.worktribe.com/output/4736738, and on my official list of publications.
The headline findings and recommendations from this work are below. While the findings may be somewhat depressing, I think this research can be the basis of making things better, and that’s what I’m all about, in both my academic and non-academic lives. Meanwhile I am very grateful to CILIPS for funding this work, and to the school librarians who took part. Many thanks also to my Napier colleagues who commented on drafts of the report.
Readers might also be interested in my presentation to the CILIPS conference in June this year. Video of this presentation, along with my slides and script, along with the conference programme, videos of other presentations and my live reportage on the conference are available in this post.
I will also make a brief presentation on the work at the next Scottish Media and Information Literacy Community of Practice (MILCoP) meeting (online, 2pm to 4pm on Thursday 23 October). You can register for that meeting on Eventbrite. (Attendance, and membership of MILCoP are entirely free.)
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CILIPS has published my blog-post building on my presentation at the CILIPS 2025 conference I this post, as well as the headline findings, I ponder the Mentimeter responses from my presentation. You might want to watch the video of this recording of this presentation, although a nasty cough marred my delivery, or see my slides and script. The formal research questions are in my script and on CILIPS’ website. I’ll publish a full project report in the next month or so, then will work on an academic paper.
To learn more about this excellent conference, you can see the programme, watch videos of other presentations and panels, see other slides, or read my live reportage on BlueSky. Meanwhile, huge thanks to CILIPS for funding this project, and to all those who generously took part.
I remain curious why Scottish community councils’ online presences are, er, not as good as I think they could be. One possible reason is their lack of impact/importance to their residents, in terms of whether such bodies tax residents in order to deliver services. In short, unlike almost the lowest tiers of government/representation in almost all other EEA countries and the other UK nations, Scottish community councils have no taxation powers, not even indirectly. Unlike every other country/nation I’ve looked at, community councils do not deliver services. In short they are only representative.
Another possible reason is lack of demand, i.e. Scottish residents simply aren’t demanding that their community councils engage well online. That is, if they don’t impact our wallets and they do nothing for us, why would we care what they offer online? Some corroboration is offered by a study of small Spanish municipalities’ websites (Pontones-Rosa et al., 2023), in which only about half of the participants used their municipalities’ websites. This lack of demand was not related to the sizes of the municipalities, so it’s not simply ‘we only need to engage with 3 people and their dog, and we can do that in-person anyway’. However, provision of more/better e-services, transparency and engagement features tended to increase with population. So perhaps there is a nuanced effect of population-size on how hyperlocal governments behave online. Further research is needed, of course.
A further possible reason, perhaps related to lack of tax powers, is that Scottish community councils do not have the financial or human resources to engage online. For example, an Edinburgh community council pays me £50 per month to take minutes of monthly meetings and manage its website and email addresses. Despite this being well below minimum wage, it’s around 50% of the community council’s annual income. Most of my career has been IT-tinged and fortunately I do not need to work full-time. But what about community councils that don’t have people like me? The majority of community councils operate on only annual grants of around £1000[1], so have to reply on whatever skills their members may have. Even though older people aren’t automatically ‘digital immigrants’, community council members tend to be near or past retirement age (Cruickshank et al., 2020), and so may not be willing or able to learn new skills.
It was also disappointing for me that the Spanish research was the only recent survey of EEA/UK hyperlocal representatives’ digital offerings I could find. Or maybe it’s an opportunity – perhaps I could get a grant to undertake such surveys across Europe, and delve into potential reasons for these hyperlocal bodies’ online behaviours.
My full findings about the EEA and UK nations are in this PDF.
[1] A very small number derive income, e.g. in Ayrshire, Orkney and Kintyre, from wind-farms and similar.
Cruickshank, P., Hall, H., & Ryan, B. (2020). Information Literacy as a joint competence shaped by everyday life and workplace roles amongst Scottish community councillors. Information Research, 25(4 (supplement)), https://doi.org/10.47989/irisic2008
Pontones-Rosa, C., Perez-Morote, R., Nunez-Chicharro, M., & Alonso-Carrillo, I. (2023). E-government in Depopulated Rural Areas. An Approach to the Reality of Spanish Municipalities. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(4), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11113-023-09808-9
This report (download link) reports the results of a survey, carried out in early 2022, of the public internet presences of potentially over 1300 Scottish community councils. It gives an update a decade after similar surveys in 2012 and 2014 (Ryan & Cruickshank, 2012, 2014). This report focuses on the timeliness and content of community council websites, and the timeliness of community councils’ Facebook and X/Twitter presences.
Searchable maps visualising the findings are available online.
In summary, there has been little positive change since the 2014, except that the number of CCs with public Facebook presences has increased noticeably.
Continue readingWith thanks as ever to Hazel for the words and so much else…
Podcasting the archive: an evaluation of audience engagement with a narrative non-fiction podcast series is now available in issue 2 of volume 28 of Archives, published last month. I am a co-author of the article alongside Professor Hazel Hall, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor.
In this work we compare audience engagement with a Second World War archive presented digitally in two formats as: (1) images and text in a Blipfoto journal, and (2) sound in an eight-episode podcast series (which starts with episode 1 here). The main findings reveal differences in levels of engagement for each presentation in respect of entertainment value, learning opportunities, and emotional response. Flexibility of access and authenticity of the archived material were also found to be important to audience engagement, with the nature of contextual information provided alongside the core archive key to the latter. Here we further understanding of facets of audience engagement with digitised archives while opening up new thinking on means of encouraging the general public to interact in more meaningful ways with historical records.
This article is the main output of the Platform to platform (P2P) and Heritage organisations and podcasts: scoping study (HOPSS) projects I led in 2022. The archive in question centres on the outputs of Lorna Beatrice Lloyd (1914-1942), principally her Diary of the war.
For those who do not have subscription access to Archives, the accepted version of the manuscript can be freely downloaded from the article’s record in the Edinburgh Napier University repository.
Bruce's IT-ish world 