Education for Information

Written heritage preservation is a complex field that requires a holistic approach reflected in the model of comprehensive written heritage preservation management. Model encompasses key issues through five key aspects, namely strategic and theoretical, economic and legal, educational, technical and operational and cultural and social aspect. Designing an OER in this field needs to include its complexity to present the content more efficiently and purposefully to the intended end-user. To be able to achieve that end goal, it is necessary to adapt the content for the online environment. Considering the concepts within the term preservation, authors propose the creation of the content framework that can facilitate and guide the effective creation of OERs in the field of written heritage preservation. Framework includes content areas derived from the key issues defined in each aspect of comprehensive written heritage preservation management model. These considerations combined with Bloom’s taxonomy result in a quality basis for selecting appropriate educational digital tools that enable the creation of an OER specific to the field of preservation.

Open educational resources (OER) and digital education (DE) have shown the ability to improve teaching and learning possibilities, particularly in light of unpredictably occurring events. Especially the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that universities were experiencing technological, socio-psychological, and didactic issues. In order to promote, enrich, and improve DE and OER for crises and beyond, this research article addresses specifically the target audiences of students and teachers in Library and Information Science (LIS) programs in Germany. A qualitative approach with interviews and focus groups was applied to identify, analyze and compare students’ and professors’ attitudes, experiences and problems in remote teaching and learning during a crisis.

The results showed that LIS professors from our sample are experienced and innovative regarding the use of DE during a period of crisis. However, diverse obstacles for the use and production of OER for online education become visible. Students’ first difficulties with online learning could be resolved and show how quickly they were able to adjust to the new teaching environment. Both LIS professors and students recognize the advantages of employing DE and OER in higher education. They emphasize positive learning experiences based on flexibility when integrating DE and OER in LIS programs.

Incorporation of information literacy into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum can be a challenge for academic librarians, in part due to different terminology than used by disciplinary faculty colleagues. Aligning terminology used in information literacy frameworks with the scientific method can provide a means of demonstrating the role of information literacy in STEM research. This paper maps the knowledge practices of the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education with an example of the scientific method. The resulting map provides an alignment of the different terminologies being used and visualizes the role of research skills throughout the process of conducting scientific research.

This paper identifies the information needs of individuals in the process of tattoo acquisition and discusses those needs in relation to information literacy skills that support tattoo information experience. Findings of 21 interviews with participants in Aotearoa New Zealand show that for a successful tattoo information experience, people need to engage with information to find a tattoo image, select and communicate their needs and negotiate with artists, mitigate health and safety risks, understand tattoo-related rights and appropriateness, capture and share their experience, and present their identity in social settings. Seven categories of information needs emerged supported by accompanying literacies under the overarching category of Information Needs (Information Literacy): Health Information Needs (Health Literacy), Visual Information Needs (Visual Literacy), Legal Information Needs (Legal Literacy), Cultural Information Needs (Cultural Literacy), Societal Information Needs (Societal Literacy), Digital and Media Information Needs (Digital and Media Literacy). Although just briefly mentioned by our participants, there was an indication of Financial Information Needs (Financial Literacy). Information literacy in the workplace and formal learning contexts has been well-researched. Still, there is an opportunity to focus more on literacies in everyday life, and tattoos present such an opportunity with significant contribution to individuals, tattoo artists and communities.

The increased accessibility of technology is often employed as rationale for data extraction and surveillance. This paper examines critical perspectives on surveillance and educational technologies from Library and Information Science (LIS) literature, as well as those from disability studies that concern technology development more broadly. This research aims to understand how a disability justice framework can interrogate both the overall expansion of surveillance technologies and justifications for increased surveillance that argue that data extraction and analytics lead to increased accessibility for disabled users. As an activist approach toward disability advocacy that underscores the connections between white supremacy, sexism and colonialism as central to ableism, disability justice recognizes surveillance technologies as embedded in systems of power that disproportionately harm people of color, immigrants, transgender people, and gender nonconforming people. Using a disability justice framework, this paper argues against the expansion of surveillance technologies – especially in the name of increasing accessibility.

This paper studies the state of discussions on DE&I and racism within LIS in EU higher education institutions.

In the library environment, games and gamification can be used to improve various services and activities. Although many successful gamification projects have already been implemented, some librarians still lack knowledge and are sceptical about the use of games in libraries. This is also the case in Slovenia, where library gamification projects are rarely formalised and publicised. Moreover, not much is known about whether Slovenian librarians obtain any knowledge about these approaches during their formal education. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with ten main compulsory course holders at the Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. The main objective of the study, which was carried out in January 2021, was to investigate the attitudes of Slovenian Library and Information Science (LIS) educators towards the inclusion of games and gamification in their courses and in academic library services. The results showed that they rarely cover games and gamification-related topics in their lectures, nor do they use them for knowledge transfer. They especially see the potential to design games and gamification activities that would promote departmental library, its services and activities, motivate students for independent research and support the educational process.

Library and information science (LIS) as a discipline is constantly changing in line with the trends of the profession, so in order to ensure that LIS curriculum in higher education addresses the needs of contemporary stakeholders, evidence-based evaluation is needed. Student satisfaction has become an important factor in considering the success of the institution of higher education. The studies on student motivation for enrolling in LIS programs are many, but papers on student perception of satisfaction with their LIS study programs are rarer. This paper focuses on the efforts of ensuring curriculum quality of the LIS program at the graduate level of study at the Department of Information Sciences of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Osijek, Croatia. The main aim of the study was to determine how satisfied the students are with the quality of their study program and to identify its strengths and weaknesses. The study was carried out by anonymous online survey in which the students were asked to rate their satisfaction with the study program and the obtained professional and lifelong learning competences. While findings of the study are relevant for the revision of the LIS study program at the Osijek Department, this study can also have larger implications for LIS education trends globally, for it has confirmed some of the results from international studies.