In this post, Information Literacy Group Co-Chair Laura Woods shared some reflections on the half-way point of the 50th year or Information Literacy.
As anyone who has been admiring our lovely 50 Years of IL logo at the top of this site will know, 2024 marks 50 years since the coining of the term “Information Literacy”. This was credited to Paul Zurkowski, then president of the American Information Industry Association, in his report ‘The Information Service Environment: Services and Priorities‘.
To mark this anniversary, the Information Literacy Group has been celebrating half a century of IL through our publications and events. As we are now just past the midway point of the year, this seemed like a good opportunity to look back and ahead!
One of my personal highlights of this year’s programming has been the Chatting Info Lit podcast, recorded and edited by our talented New Professionals group. Their most recent (at time of writing) episode is a special documentary, looking back at 50 years of IL with guests including ILG founder Debbi Boden-Angell, and of course our very own past Chair, Jane Secker. The insights the podcast guests share on the development of information literacy definitions and discourses over time are illuminating and thought-provoking. Credit must go to Beth Morgan, Josh Rodda, and Ella Wharton for drawing out these insights through their interviews, and to Josh for his skillful editing of the episode to craft a compelling narrative of IL past, present and future.
I have also been enjoying reading the Journal of Information Literacy’s ‘IL at 50’ special issue. I haven’t quite made my way through it all just yet, but my favourites so far have been two provocations: Annmaree Lloyd on the need to chase IL practices “into the wild”, for a deeper understanding of IL in everyday contexts, and Jess Haigh’s thoughtful and personal reflections on the need to consider critical information literacy as a collective praxis to acknowledge the centrality of white supremacy within our profession and work to dismantle it.
In terms of events, of course LILAC is always the highlight of my professional calendar! Several months on, I find I am still reflecting on Maha Bali’s excellent keynote on teaching critical AI literacy (Note: the LILAC keynotes were not recorded, so I have linked to a talk Maha gave at a different conference, which she shared in the LILAC hashtag stating that it covered similar content). As mentioned in my own post-LILAC blog, I am still thinking about Maha’s excellent AI-as-cake metaphor, and have used this in discussion with students. Beyond this practical point, Maha’s talk also caused me to reflect on what we expect of students and how we communicate those expectations. These are insights I think will remain with me for a long time.
And of course, the year is far from over! Our IL@50 celebrations will continue for the rest of 2024. Currently we are collecting entries for a themed blog post, and we need your reflections! Can you tell us your thoughts on information literacy in 50 words? See our blog post for details and how to enter!
We also have further events planned for the second half of the year, including of course Icepops, the copyright literacy conference, which is now open for bookings. Further event announcements will be coming soon, including a webinar for anyone interested in submitting an abstract to next year’s LILAC, and you may want to mark your calendars for Media and Information Literacy Week in October…
We hope that our IL community has also been enjoying our IL@50 celebrations this year. What have your highlights been? Let us know in the comments!
