Empowering information literacy and continuing professional development of librarians: new paradigms for learning.

Martzoukou, Konstantina

Abstract

Information professionals play a key role in facilitating and advocating the development of information literacy in educational, organizational and everyday life contexts. However, their information literacy continuing professional needs have not attracted sufficient attention in research. This qualitative study explores information professionals' perspectives of information literacy within their working practices. The paper reports on the preliminary findings of interviews conducted with a total of seventeen professional and non-professional librarians with experience of working in academic, public or special libraries. Librarians' definitions of information literacy highlighted a weak connection between information literacy development needs and everyday working context, when not directly involving information services to library users. However, information literacy and digital literacy were perceived as interconnected competencies, with the latter requiring ongoing development. Participants highlighted examples of blockage to their overall continuing professional development (e.g. management style, lack of resources) which emphasize the need for expanding online professional educational opportunities and promoting a culture of sharing and openness in the library profession.

Citation

MARTZOUKOU, K. 2013. Empowering information literacy and continuing professional development of librarians: new paradigms for learning. In Kurbanoglu, S., Grassian, E., Mizrachi, D., Catts, R. and Špiranec, S. (eds.) Worldwide commonalities and challenges in information literacy research and practice: revised selected papers from the proceedings of the 2013 European conference on information literacy (ECIL 2013), 22-25 October 2013, Istanbul, Turkey. Communications in computer and information science, 397. Cham: Springer [online], pages 647-654. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03919-0_87

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2013 European conference on information literacy (ECIL 2013)
• Start Date: Oct 22, 2013
• End Date: Oct 25, 2013
• Acceptance Date: Oct 25, 2013
• Online Publication Date: Oct 25, 2013
• Publication Date: Dec 22, 2013
• Deposit Date: Sep 21, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 21, 2016
• Print ISSN: 1865-0929
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 647-654
• Series Title: Communications in computer and information science
• Series Number: 397
• ISBN: 9783319039183
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03919-0_87
• Keywords: Librarians; Continuing professional development; Information literacy; Digital literacy; Online learning
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/1825
• Contract Date: Sep 21, 2016