When RAND Corporation published its 2018 report Truth Decay in the US, Barack Obama put it on his summer reading list. In 2022 RAND published Truth Decay in Europe. Here one of its authors, Stijn Hoorens, a keynote speaker at this week’s CILIP Conference 2024, discusses what truth decay looks like across Europe and in the UK, where he says libraries are “an essential part of the solution”.

The potential for truth decay to damage society can range from not being able to talk to neighbours or family about particular issues through to statistics agencies, universities and health agencies no longer being trusted. So, it should be useful to know how bad truth decay is at a local level.

Ahead of his keynote speech at CILIP Conference 2024 Stijn Hoorens, Office Director of RAND Europe, Netherlands and Senior Research Leader, spoke to Information Professional about the state of truth decay in Europe, the UK and the role of libraries and librarians in addressing the problem.

Exacerbated or exaggerated?

Asked if the findings of the Truth Decay in ¬Europe report, published in 2022, were affected by post pandemic financial upheaval and the war in Ukraine, Stijn said the report “concluded that truth decay is occurring, but not to the same extent as it in the US. There is evidence in Europe of an increasing disagreement about facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion over fact; and a decline in trust in traditional sources of information. But there is a lot of diversity across countries, which suggests that there is still time to slow down or counter the problem in Europe.”

He added that while “most of the research and data we considered for our report stem from before the pandemic, the information wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the hesitancy against the COVID vaccine and increasing popularity of conspiracy theories suggest the phenomenon has been exacerbated in Europe since publication of the report. Although much of this is anecdotal, there is certainly some empirical evidence supporting this.

“But we should bear in mind that what we read in the news or see on social media, is not necessarily representative of the entire population. Relatively small minorities of very active and vocal individuals often dominate online debates.”

Less danger than the US

The report suggests Europe and the UK do not suffer from the same level of the truth decay as the US and have some cultural or ¬institutional safety nets, according to Stijn: “Europe is probably equally exposed to the risks posed by (foreign) agents, changes of publishing model, and technological trends such as AI and social media. When looking at the drivers of truth decay, we find the biggest difference between the two regions are in the education system and polarisation. First, we conclude that most education systems in Europe are better utilised to prepare their students to address the challenges related to truth decay.

“With regard to polarisation, we found evidence that this phenomenon is deeper and happening faster in the US across all dimensions we analysed: economic, racial, religious, ideological and political. It’s not a surprise that political polarisation is much stronger in the US than in most parts of Europe. We have measured this by analysing election results across Europe and placing political parties on a left-right scale. On this scale the Republicans have moved to the right and democrats to the left. Whilst in Europe, we see some evidence of a hollowing out of the centrist parties, by no means is this as strong as it is in the US. The recent European elections reinforced these findings.”

Polarisation prevention system

He said polarisation was usually measured using population surveys asking about political affinity and respondent’s opinions about supporters of the opposition: “Again, partisanship in the United States has deepened over the past decades, strengthening a feeling of ‘us versus them’, whereas the trend in most European countries has gone in the opposite direction. There are various potential explanations for these differences between Europe and the US. First, compared to the first-past-the-post district system in the US, the direct representation electoral systems and multi-party systems in most of Europe require coalition formation and dialogue between political parties, which can have a mitigating effect on polarisation. The highly politicised media landscape and tradition in the US may further exacerbate these effects.”

Is the UK worse than the rest of Europe?

The report highlighted some localised problems, like the effect of Brexit in the UK, but Stijn says: “Unfortunately, we did not conduct a systematic comparison between individual European countries, although this would be a very interesting exercise. So, it is hard to say one country is more at risk than the other. Our report mentions discrepancies in public perception of benefit fraud and teenage pregnancy from a study (Hopkin and Rosamund) looking at public perceptions of phenomena compared to their official statistics. British people believed that £24 per £100 of welfare benefits are claimed fraudulently, while in fact this was only £0.70 in reality. And there are other indications that there is an increasing disagreement about facts and evidence in the UK.

“These differences may, in part, be explained by news consumption and the journalistic tradition in the UK, which follows a more liberal model that is more akin to the US than to the rest of Europe. This model is rooted in a fact-centred tradition, but it is also increasingly ¬entertainment-oriented, due to increased commercial pressures and competition from other media. In this model, with its prominent tabloid press, entertainment and left-right preferences may prevail for people when deciding what news outlets to use. And indeed, when you look at measures of news audience polarisation, the UK ranks among several eastern and southern European countries rather than west-European countries.”

Essential libraries

Asked if libraries play a role he says: “Definitely, libraries are an essential part of the solution to stop the trend of an eroding role for facts and evidence in society.” Stijn points to a number of ways in which this can happen:

• libraries have a crucial role in ensuring that people have access to objective facts and evidence, whether it is academic research or objective news reporting. Moreover, they are indispensable in ensuring that this access extends into perpetuity;
• secondly, libraries are important knowledge brokers. In a world with an unprecedented and still increasing pace and volume of information, the media landscape has become inundated with content from millions of sources. Libraries have an important role in helping citizens to see the wood from the trees, for instance by distinguishing fact from opinion;
• and do not underestimate the potential importance of physical libraries as locations where people can get out of their bubble and encounter people with different sets of beliefs, opinions or backgrounds. A healthy democracy is helped by an open exchange of views;
• but also libraries could become agents of truth decay if they do not fulfil these roles – willingly or unwillingly. I am thinking of the “anti-woke” movement in some US states, where libraries were forced to censor their catalogues.

“I think libraries have three important assets that can be helpful in tackling truth decay, each of which are useful in strategies to mitigate truth decay, such as media literacy interventions: their content, as training material; their community-based locations as physical space for education and training; and their staff, who are experts and can help citizens to train their media literacy skills and become aware of their cognitive biases.”

Right-wing suspicion of libraries?

Asked if libraries may be less effective in combatting right wing truth decay ¬because they are seen as left-leaning institutions, Stijn said: “In principle, truth decay is agnostic to political orientation. Both sides of the political spectrum are vulnerable to risks of truth decay, and there are plenty of examples where movements or individuals from the left and the right have acted as agents of truth decay. And populism has also manifested itself on both sides of the political spectrum. But it is hard to deny that we are experiencing a gaining popularity of populist right-wing movements, for whom libraries are clearly a lower priority. And I can follow the suggestion that their electorate is particularly vulnerable to truth decay, partly because of the limited access to tools that help mitigate truth decay, such as quality education, quality journalism, etc.”

He adds: “At RAND, we have been very careful not to politicise this topic, as we do not think it helps the debate or tackling the problem itself. Truth decay is not right-wing or left-wing, it is a problem for the functioning of democracies and societies as a whole.”

Academia

Truth Decay in Europe also looks at academia and discusses the publishing model as one of the drivers. The report cites research showing 1.97 per cent of scientists admitted fabricated, falsified or modified data and 33.7 per cent admitted other questionable research practices. Stijn said: “Of course academic libraries can help mitigate this trend. Although the academic funding model is probably the main driver behind the ‘publish or perish’ culture, libraries may play a role in facilitating alternatives to this model. For example, by encouraging alternatives to traditional journal publications in disseminating scholarly results.”

Trust trap

He said: “I think librarians are particularly skilled and well-trained to help tackle truth decay, particularly in distinguishing between fact and opinion, assessing reliability of sources, navigating the knowledge landscape, identifying potential sources of objective information, and not unimportantly offering a historical perspective.”

However, he warned against librarians gatekeeping access for their communities: “It may be attractive to believe that trusted knowledge brokers can help tackle truth decay by blocking access to unreliable, false or misleading information. But in a world where trust in institutions formerly respected as sources of factual information, data and analysis is under pressure, it may be better to call out such information, and explain why it is not reliable, than to censor it.”

Even when the volume of information is overwhelming he said librarians run the risk of being accused of censorship “if filtering means blocking access” but not “if it means highlighting sources that can be considered objective, fact-based, reliable, etc. whilst being transparent about that process and its rationale.”

Elections

With elections in the UK and US in 2024, what are the danger areas and possible solutions? Stijn suggests fast fact-checking is one way to combat truth decay. He says: “There are plenty of examples of misleading claims by politicians during election campaigns. As such, they are in danger of becoming agents of truth decay. Boris’s £350 million to the NHS claim was one of the most famous ones.

“But let me give you an example from the Netherlands. Last summer, the government collapsed after the minister of Home Affairs (equivalent to Home Secretary), and member of Mark Rutte’s centre right party VVD, falsely claimed that thousands of immigrants settled in the Netherlands after their family, or “family of family” had successfully claimed asylum. The consequences were significant as it blew up the coalition government. The national elections that followed were dominated by the perceived migration crisis and the right-wing anti-migration party of Geert Wilders won the elections. Later, instead of thousands, the actual figure turned out to be 40 family of family members in 2021 and 130 in 2022.

“Had this claim been debunked ¬immediately, would things have gone differently? I don’t know. But I do ¬believe that political debates, party manifestos and election claims are helped by being scrutinised by quality journalism, fact checkers and objective researchers as an effective accountability mechanism in the democratic system.

“Also in the Netherlands, there is a tradition of having the economic impacts of election manifestos for the economy and for households calculated by the Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), an independent govern¬ment body. This has always served as a safety valve to unrealistic proposals and unsubstantiated claims. In recent years, however, more and more political parties refuse to send their manifestos to the CPB, which is another token of the eroding role of facts and evidence in the political debate.”

By Stephane Goldstein, Executive Director of InformAll and the coordinator for MILA and Advocacy and Outreach Officer for CILIP's Information Literacy Group; and Geoff Walton, Senior Lecturer in the iSchool at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the Forum for Information Literacy (FOIL).

20 April 2022

The January/February issue of Information Professional carried an article introducing the new Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA). The Alliance has made some progress since then and in particular is taking initial steps to ensure that it engages with stakeholders beyond the library and information professional realm.

"Information literacy (IL) continues to be a central interest to information professionals and increasingly to the academic community..."

In January, MILA’s Executive Board met for the first time. Its composition reflects a necessary diversity of outlooks, professional backgrounds and areas of expertise:

Jane Secker (Chair of the Board) – Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at City, University of London, and Chair of the CILIP Information Literacy Group
Lucy Crompton-Reid – Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK
Sue Lacey-Bryant – National Lead, NHS Library and Knowledge Services
Julian McDougal – Professor in Media and Education, Bournemouth University
Liz Moorse – Chief Executive, Association for Citizenship Teachi
ng
Lis Parcell – Subject specialist, digital practice, Jisc
Nick Poole – CEO of CILIP
Sophie Randall – Director of Patient Information Forum
Anoush Simon – Senior Lecturer in Information Studies, Aberystwyth University
Carolyn Waite – Information Development Manager, Lancashire Libraries

Useful and beneficial

An early priority for the Board is to define how MILA engages with its stakeholders in ways that are useful for them as well as beneficial for the Alliance. This means setting up simple but effective mechanisms that will allow interested individuals and organisations to share information, take part in initiatives of mutual interest and advocate jointly. The Board has already agreed that MILA will not be set up as a formal membership body. Instead, it will function as a federation or coalition of players with shared objectives, building synergies and helping to amplify work that is already taking place, whilst avoiding duplication with existing projects undertaken elsewhere. Other early areas of attention for the Board will be to set out a clearly-understandable definition of media and information literacy (MIL), and charting a selection current MIL initiatives in the UK to help define future MILA projects. Another key area for MILA is to commission relevant research. Information literacy (IL) continues to be a central interest to information professionals and increasingly to the academic community but, to extend its reach beyond these domains, MILA believes a convincing comprehensive summary of high-quality research literature is needed. Such a product is even more necessary if we are to support our arguments of its importance with high-quality evidence and influence policy makers, thought leaders and government.

Research and review

MILA is thus looking to fund a study to help map and extend the reach of IL beyond the higher education domain to other areas such as health, the workplace and everyday life (as reported last month, media literacy is already well-served in terms of terms of current reviews, so the proposed study will focus more specifically on IL). The funding provided will provide a comprehensive review of IL, its key research, scholars, practitioners and impact. The review sho uld analyse all types of research, qualitative, quantitative or mixed. It is hoped this will provide the basis for work to create greater public awareness of information literacy and its positive impact.

MILA is asking that the scope of the comprehensive review covers existing research into the role that IL plays for different user groups in society and the barriers/enablers to shaping an information literate population. It is envisaged that the project will encompass all research-based peer-review IL research since 2005 across all sectors. The MILA working group overseeing the scoping of the project has now almost completed its work and, at time of writing, is preparing to issue a call for proposals to identify a research team able to take this forward.

Finally, MILA is also looking forward to develop its communications strategy. The current website, will soon be expanded to reflect the Alliance’s growing areas of involvement, and there will also be a more engaging feel to the site. Further information on joining the MILA mailing or finding out more can be found on MILA's Get involved page.

CILIP is a founder-member of the Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA) – the cross-sector alliance founded to help people lead happier, healthier and safer lives online.

Disinformation has been a feature of conflicts throughout history. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen a significant increase in the creation and distribution of disinformation, ‘fake news’ and other misleading sources.

Our colleagues in Ukrainian libraries and information services are organising themselves to combat Russian state-backed and other forms of disinformation. We have put this page together to provide information for CILIP members wishing to support these efforts.

It should also be noted that according to Full Fact, disinformation is being used on both sides of the conflict. It is important to be conscious of this when considering how best to minimise the risks of spreading information.

STOP

Consider our own biases

It is important to be conscious of our own biases and prejudice when approaching a piece of information. Are we predisposed to believe one side over the other? In an asymmetric invasion like the situation in Ukraine, it is easy to sympathise with the victims over the aggressors, and to tend to be more ready to believe their information.

Be sceptical

The Internet has triggered a democratisation of the media – anyone can share news and information and make it look authoritative. Disinformation and fake news depend on people uncritically sharing information they find online – often targeted to them by an algorithm. The best way to avoid being a vector for fake news and disinformation is to be actively sceptical and to apply discernment to all information that comes our way.

Ask ‘how do I feel?’

A lot of disinformation is created to provoke an emotional reaction by speaking to our sense of outrage, morality or political values. Some of it is created as ‘clickbait’ while some is intended as parody or a joke. Take a moment to consider whether the information seems designed to make you angry or worried, rather than conveying the facts.

Ask ‘in whose interest’?

Balanced news reporting will focus primarily on giving you a factual account of events and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. If a source seems to be leading you to a conclusion, ask in whose interest it is for the story to be skewed in that direction.

VERIFY

Use trusted sources

There is no such thing as an entirely dispassionate or neutral source. It is always a good sign if a news outlet lets you know upfront what its point of view is! A good place to start is the library – news materials and databases made available through your local public, school, college or health library are likely to have been assessed in advance for their commitment to balance, fair reporting and their use of evidence.

Read the whole story

It is important to go beyond the headline and to read the whole of a story before sharing it. This is particularly important in today’s 24-hour news cycle, in which editorial is recycled, updated and amended throughout the day.

A recent example in Ukraine related to Ukrainian forces stationed on ‘Snake Island’ who were widely reported as having been killed by a Russian warship. Within hours, the story had been corrected to indicate that they had been captured, but many headlines remained unchanged.

Find supporting sources

Corroboration is a key element of journalism, and indeed of providing good information in all walks of life. If you are sceptical about a piece of news or information, it is helpful to seek other trusted sources which confirm what the original is saying. This is not foolproof, however – there are plenty of examples of disinformation that is supported by a wide range of apparently authoritative sources.

Apply critical judgement

As an information professional, you will know how easily images and video can be faked or manipulated. This appears to be a particular issue in the Ukrainian conflict, in which a significant amount of highly visible social media content has been proven to be fake.

These sites can help you bring a more critical eye to online media:

Read the Full Fact guide – Ukraine and beyond: How to spot misleading videos

Read the Full Fact guide – How to spot misleading images

Read the Full Fact guide – How to spot misleading headlines

CORRECT

Share better information

Once you have verified a piece of information, you can act as a ‘node’ in the network which shares and promotes it. Part of the problem is that fake news and disinformation tend to spread virally and incredibly quickly, while corrections tend to reach a smaller audience and move more slowly. You can be part of combatting fake news by helping to wash better information through the system.

Call out disinformation

Where you spot a piece of fake news or disinformation being shared – for example by friends, family or colleagues on social media platforms – don’t be afraid to call it out, but always provide a link to the information or evidence that proves it is false (such as an article from a reputable fact-checking site).

Be a trusted source

Libraries are widely trusted as sources of authoritative and impartial information (noting that no source is ever ‘neutral’). As a librarian or information professional, you can assemble information, displays, reading materials and other sources which provide a fair and balanced view on what is happening in Ukraine. This is an important service that you can provide for your users.

Educate others

As librarians and information professionals, we are ideally-placed to educate people about fake news and disinformation and to help them develop their digital, media and information literacy.

CILIP believes that media and information literacy is as essential in today’s connected world as reading literacy has been for the past century. Through the Media and Information Literacy Alliance, we are working to provide information and resources on how you can help your users develop their own resilience against fake news and disinformation.

Find information poster below and download link in pdf format.

Find out more at the Media Information Literacy Alliance (MILA).

Further resources

• The UK Government’s Resist 2 – counter-disinformation toolkit
• BBC News Reality Check (i.e. the BBC’s own fact checking service)
• The Debunking Handbook(pdf>, one of whose authors is Steve Lewandowsky
• Seven tips for spotting disinformation related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict from Stanford University
• Fake viral footage is spreading alongside the real horror in Ukraine. Here are 5 ways to spot it, an article in The Conversation, by T J Thomson, from Queensland University of Technology
• Stop Fake, a Ukrainian initiative from the Kyiv Mohyla Journalism School

Banner image: A mother and her child are feeling violence, Bucha, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, 4 March 2022. Photo: Oleksandr Ratushnyak / UNDP Ukraine, Source: UNDP Flickr, Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA) is a new initiative, co-sponsored by CILIP and the CILIP Information Literacy Group, aimed at securing greater recognition for information and media literacy (MIL) in society at large. Stéphane Goldstein discusses MILA’s aims and how it will achieve them.

MILA was successfully launched during UNESCO’s Global MIL Week at the end of October, with two online webinars run on consecutive days in England and Scotland. Having laid some foundations over the summer, the Alliance is now ready for lift-off.

The case for MILA

Why MILA, and why now? Information literacy (IL) has long been promoted by academic librarians and has a substantial body of peer review research at its foundation. But in the UK, IL has mostly been poorly understood and has not featured in the worldview of policymakers and practitioners beyond the information professions. For many years, CILIP’s Information Literacy Group (ILG) has sought to engage with a variety of players, including civil servants, third sector bodies and educational organisations, but with limited success. While such organisations have often understood the arguments in favour of IL, for the most part, they’ve not really been able or willing to integrate them in their strategies, policies and practices. Advocating for IL, and even just raising awareness of it, has therefore often been challenging, in part because many players have not understood how IL differs from digital skills and digital literacy.

Attitudes may now be starting to shift, albeit slowly. Arguably the most notable factor influencing this shift was the publication, in July, of the Government’s Online Media Literacy Strategy, driven by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), alongside the Draft Online Safety Bill currently making its way through Parliament. The Strategy’s focus is on media literacy – but the lengthy definition of media literacy set out in both the Strategy and the Bill, with its emphasis on critical approaches to online information, suggests a significant degree of overlap between media literacy and IL. Moreover, the Strategy makes extensive references to IL, particularly in the context of addressing disinformation. Indeed, it is the first time that IL features so prominently in a national, UK policy document.

The Strategy is far from perfect (CILIP and ILG produced a joint statement in reaction to it, including setting out concerns about its shortcomings), but it has the virtue of providing a strategic framework for fostering a culture where, as set out in the ministerial foreword, users “are able to critically evaluate the content they consume, understand that online actions can have offline consequences, and be able to contribute to a respectful and kind online environment”. And crucially, the Strategy, as well as recognising the role of libraries, calls for increased collaboration and coordination between stakeholders with an interest in media literacy and IL, to help overcome a sometimes disparate and duplicative approach to joint working.

Championing and collaborating

This is where the opportunity for MILA arises, and the rationale for the Alliance is very much about bringing together individuals and organisations to champion MIL and to provide an open platform for collaboration and knowledge exchange. Importantly, CILIP and ILG decided from the outset that MILA’s scope should cover both IL and media literacy. They recognised that although historically the two concepts stem from different professional and cultural perspectives – librarianship and information science in the case of IL, and media studies for media literacy – as we have noted, in practice, there is much crossover between the two.

It is clear that, in the UK, media literacy is driving the public policy agenda in this area, and it therefore makes sense for the Alliance’s remit to capitalise on this by tying in IL with media literacy. MILA’s reach and potential influence should benefit correspondingly. Moreover, the idea of associating IL and media literacy is not new: UNESCO brought together the two concepts under the umbrella of MIL several years ago, and its own world-wide MIL Alliance – formerly known as GAPMIL, Global Alliance for Partnerships on Media and Information Literacy – goes back to 2013. MILA therefore mirrors what has been going on internationally.

MILA is in its early days and there remains much to be defined about its organisation, membership and programme of activities, but it has already succeeded in attracting interest from a variety of organisations. In the first instance, it has got into a valuable dialogue with DCMS and with the UK media regulator, Ofcom, whose statutory responsibilities include researching and promoting media literacy through its Making Sense of Media programme. Other bodies with which the Alliance has started engaging include, among others, the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University, JCS Online Resources, the National Literacy Trust, Newsguard UK, the NHS Library and Knowledge Services, the Patient Information Forum, the Guardian Foundation, WEA and Wikimedia UK.

That list is growing by the week and MILA is now looking at ways of formally associating organisations and individuals within the structure of the Alliance. And though CILIP and ILG are the founders and initial co-sponsors of MILA, it is clear that, to be successful, it will need be ‘owned’ by a wide and diverse collection of players, with an organisational set-up that enables it to work effectively on a collegiate basis. Since October, the Alliance has its own website, which although still in a basic form, is helping with outreach and promotion.

In addition to starting a dialogue with multiple stakeholders, MILA has now initiated its first two projects: the production of its Media and Information Literacy Framework; and the scoping of a systematic review of IL research.

Media and Information Literacy Framework

The purpose of the MIL Framework is to demonstrate what media and information literacy means for people in everyday life and in various recognisable settings. It reflects MILA’s aspiration to promote MIL by making it understandable across situations with which everyone can readily identify. To do this, the Framework identifies five lifelong aspirations:

• be informed
• be empowered
• be healthy
• be socially conscious
• be connected

The Framework provides examples in the form of questions to illustrate how information and media related issues are experienced in day-to-day life. The Framework is thus anchored in real situations and problems. It then sets out, in plain terms, the understanding and the capabilities that people need to answer such questions. For instance, under the ‘be empowered’ aspiration, one of the example questions is ‘I am having some problems with a work colleague and I have shared those on a public Facebook group. What would happen if my employer found those?’ To answer this, the Framework stresses the importance of recognising that information shared and created by individuals is as important as information they create; and of checking how one’s information and data is being used. It goes on to list some key abilities and skills, including being able to change privacy settings on social media and tailoring audiences to decide what is shared and with whom.

This practical approach is repeated throughout the Framework, with an emphasis on helping people reflect on how to get the most out of information that they encounter, use and create; and on how to reach decisions about the nature, relevance, usefulness and quality of such information. The Framework is also designed to be adapted to suit individual and organisations’ needs and strategies. At present, it is still in draft form, and there will be an active phase of consultation and testing in 2022. MILA welcomes views about how it might be refined, presented and disseminated.

Systematic review

One of MILA’s natural areas of involvement is to help develop the evidence base. With this in mind, it is currently scoping a systematic review on the outputs of IL research, with a view to demonstrating the value and impact of IL. In this instance, the focus would be on IL rather than more broadly on MIL, because a robust review of IL research to determine its canon of key foundational research is long overdue.

Moreover, Ofcom is developing its own programme of research into media literacy, so MILA will avoid the risk of duplicating that by concentrating more specifically on IL. A preliminary search on the Web of Science citation database suggests that, since 1983, 5,550 peer-reviewed articles have been published that are relevant to IL – and that is almost certainly a conservative estimate. There is therefore no shortage of material to categorise and analyse.

Systematic reviews are studies of studies, attempts to collect all existing empirical evidence on a specific topic in order to answer a research question. Their rigorous nature and capacity to reduce bias makes them well-suited to address fields such as IL where there is a large body of qualitative data and they are well-established in health, social policy and education research. But they can also include meta-analysis in order to address qualitative as well as quantitative evidence.

A working group has been set up to help scope the review. At time of writing, this has met three times and has made progress in setting some broad parameters for the study. More work is required to define research questions, agree inclusion and exclusion criteria and put together a specification so as to issue a call for proposals, ideally during the first quarter of 2022. If all goes well, and if sources of funding are identified to undertake the work, the review should be completed well before the end of the year.

What next?

MILA has been in existence for barely four months and it can already point to early achievements. But much more remains to be done, and one of the immediate priorities is to define how the Alliance will function: its membership structure, its governance, the way it will engage with its stakeholders as well as its management and operation. Steps are currently being taken to address these points. A key imperative is to identify a core group of players, other than CILIP and ILG, willing to play an active role in helping to set up appropriate structures and systems. To this effect, MILA recently set up its Board, representing a wide range of professional perspectives; this held its inaugural meeting on 17 January. Other priorities over the coming months include formulating a programme of activities, building on what is described above; securing additional funding to complement the small grant provided by CILIP as seed funding; funding of research to demonstrate the value of MIL for the five lifelong aspirations set out in the Framework; and developing a communications strategy, with appropriate tools, including expanding the website so that it can eventually become a genuine community resource.

MILA will necessarily be a collective endeavour and therefore welcomes ideas and suggestions. If any readers of this article are interested in joining the Alliance’s mailing list or becoming involved in the initiative, there is a short form on the MILA website. And even better, MILA would be grateful if information about it were circulated among your contacts and networks, including outside the library world. You can contact the Alliance by writing to Stéphane Goldstein. Look out too for regular updates in future issues of Information Professional.

Dr Maren Deepwell is the CEO of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), having joined the Association in 2008, she has led the organisation since 2012 including a strategic transition to becoming a virtual team in 2018. Since 2018, she has led the organisation as a fully distributed, virtual team and is currently writing an Open Access coaching book on leading virtual teams – here she shares an extract ahead of its release in spring 2022.

IN 2020 many countries around the world moved learning online in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, most schools, colleges and university campuses closed from March 2020 until the end of the summer term. The ‘great pivot online’ enabled students to continue their learning during months of lockdown and the only gradual return to in person teaching.

At the same time as learning moved online, so did the workplace for an increasing proportion of the population. In the UK, the average percentage of adults working from home increased from 27 per cent to 37 per cent, and estimates suggest that globally up to 88 per cent of organisations “encouraged or required employees to work from home”, from March 2020.

A year on, the UK Business Insights and Conditions Survey (April 2021) showed that in education 48 per cent of employees continue to work from home, the fourth largest percentage behind Real Estate Activities (57 per cent), Professional Scientific and Technical Activities (71 per cent) and Information and Communication (81 per cent). According to the Office for National Statistics, 24 per cent of businesses overall intend to use increased homeworking as a permanent business model going forward, and in education this rises to 37.6 per cent.

Reporting from the survey, the ONS further states: “Both businesses and individuals preferred a ‘hybrid’ working approach (a mixture of both office and homeworking) in the future. However, while nearly two-fifths (38 per cent) of businesses expected 75 per cent or more of their workforce to be at their normal place of work, a large proportion (36 per cent) of those currently homeworking thought they would spend the majority or all their time homeworking in the future.”

This aligns with predictions made by a survey conducted by Gartner, which shows that in the U.S. “82 per cent of respondents intend to permit remote working some of the time as -employees return to the workplace”, and a further forecast that “by the end of 2021, 51 per cent of all knowledge workers worldwide are expected to be working remotely, up from 27 per cent of knowledge workers in 2019”.

Hybrid is here to stay

Although these surveys also show that there is still a significant amount of uncertainty in all industries, a greater adoption of hybrid and homeworking looks to be a certainty. What started as a response to a global crisis is now becoming part of the status quo for an increasing number of people.

When learning moved online and homes across the world suddenly turned into virtual classrooms, many students’ first experience of learning online at scale was a response to a crisis. It is remarkable to consider what was achieved with little or no notice by Learning Technologists all across the world, supporting staff and students. Learning Technology made learning, teaching and assessment during the pandemic possible and provided some continuity in the face of what is commonly referred to as unprecedented circumstances. But we also know that what many experienced was crisis provision, an emergency response version of online learning which was borne of necessity using whatever tools and platforms were readily available. It wasn’t a carefully designed offering full of creativity, engagement and flexibility as we know the best online and blended learning can be. There was no time to learn from the rich body of research and practice that would usually inform the design of new courses and modules, there was only time to respond to crisis after crisis as months of lockdown dragged on.

Similarly, many employees who suddenly found themselves at their kitchen table with their laptop had a first taste of working remotely in a time of crisis. Just like schools and colleges had little notice before they moved online, employers often had to send staff to work from home from one day to the next with little or no support and preparation. The result, for many, was the equivalent of learning during a crisis, a kind of emergency homeworking.

Shift the narrative

Homeschooling and homeworking kept many people safe during the dark days of 2020, but in both cases our emergency response has to evolve from crisis provision to a brighter vision of what virtual learning and virtual working should look like. As universities, colleges and schools invest in expertise and infrastructure to take their blended offering to a new level, so do employers who are looking to adopt a hybrid or home-based working model.

In learning and teaching we might think of the digital learning environment or learning management system as fundamental to learning online at scale, and for the workplace there is comparable infrastructure to be put in place. Once you have your foundation of technology, policy and capability however, where do you go?

In education, online learning is often described as inferior to in-person learning and teaching. The common perception is that if you translate what you are used to doing in person and on campus, such as a lecture for example, and put its equivalent, such as a lecture recording, online, you lose something in the process, it’s a “lecture-deficit” model, if you like.

Which is why it is so important that we shift “the narrative about online education from a deficit one… We need to find ways to ensure that we see some advantages to this different mode of education and garner the benefits of its particular world of possibilities. … It won’t be easy; it won’t be cheap; but our online education won’t be a paltry imitation of old and tired genres like the lecture.”

Equitable and engaging

Creating a richer vision for the future of the virtual classroom highlights what we need to imagine for the future of the virtual workplace, too, and this is the primary purpose of this book.

In this book I want to look at what’s beyond translating office-based working practices online and not focus on what home-workers lose in the process, in a kind of “office-deficit” model. Instead I will share how a distributed organisation can be a welcoming and warm place to work and how you can empower staff in making virtual working an equitable and engaging reality that benefits the organisation and the individual alike.

In 2017 I embarked on a journey of organisational transformation as the CEO of an independent charity, as we took our organisation from a traditional, office-based model of operations to a fully virtual, distributed team. In comparison to many businesses who were forced to adopt home-working in response to the global pandemic, we made the transition for strategic reasons over the period of a year. Instead of sending staff home with a laptop one day and starting home-working the next, we went through formal consultation periods and implemented the transition gradually, providing support and training at every stage. As a result we made a very successful transition and started to focus on how to evolve our approach to working as a virtual team beyond practical considerations from the outset.

People and business needs

When I set out to create a new vision for what working for our virtual organisation would be like, I came across a lot of practical advice about infrastructure and business processes (like article this from Scientific American) and I also read a lot of management books (such as Dr Gleb Tsipursky’s Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage) that seemed intent on helping leaders and managers to translate traditional power structures from the office to the virtual workplace with a strong emphasis on productivity, cost-savings and employee surveillance. None of what I came across helped to answer my questions.

What I was looking for was authentic insight into what it’s like to manage people remotely and to lead an organisation from home, and to do it well. And by “doing it well”, I mean not only meeting budget targets and KPIs but to balance business needs with employee happiness and wellbeing. I was looking to find creative and fun ways to work with people you may never meet in person and to build meaningful working relationships. I was looking for ethical ways to work online that respect employee privacy and build trust between the organisation and its staff. In short, I was looking for the opposite of the ‘office-deficit’ model.

This is why I am writing this book. It’s the book I wish I had found when I was setting out on my journey to lead a virtual team. I hope it will provide a source of inspiration and a prompt for reflection to my readers and will be of practical help with managing hybrid, blended and fully distributed teams and organisations.

Although for many people around the world remote working has been a pandemic necessity, it is by no means a new practice. Working from home has a long history. Here in the UK the industrial age saw a rise in home workers, usually women who worked from home for an outside employer, were described as the ‘hidden workforce’ or the ‘sweated trades’ (Bythell, 1978). This type of work stood in contrast to independent, skilled craftspeople who practiced their trade from home prior to industrialisation. Inequalities affected these (often unskilled) homeworkers and poor working conditions and pay were particularly widespread between 1850 and 1914 across a broad range of industries, including the tailoring industry, shoe, glove and boot making and also straw plaiting and sack making (Pennington & Westover, 1989).

A hundred years later, at the beginning of another era of widespread homeworking and we are now faced with renewed questions about how this will increase inequality and for which parts of the population. Supported by digital technologies we may now have more flexibility working from home, but the pressures of for example caring for children and other family members whilst earning an income remain.

A horizon scanning report published by UK Parliament in April 2021 highlights how little is known about current practice and the long-term impact of an increase in flexible employment. It concludes:

“The impact on health and well-being of the increase of technologies in the workplace and long-term working from home is not yet known and could have potential effects on healthcare systems. Positive benefits from increased flexible working will not be equally distributed throughout the population and could increase economic and social inequalities.”

This book sets out to examine the many factors that impact on the homeworking employee and the employer, and how those change in the long term. Featuring examples of organisational transformation collected over a number of years, each chapter poses questions through which you can examine your own policies and approaches and explore practical solutions to common issues encountered by virtual teams. It presents an opportunity to rethink how we work, to reimagine home as a workplace for this new era of distributed working and to consider what is most important to us and how we can shape our working lives for the better.

From Virtual Learning to Virtual Working: Open Leadership in practice by Dr Maren Deepwell will be published in 2022 as an Open Access publication by the Association for Learning Technology.

How might information literacy be better recognised as a vital contribution to society? This is a question which is addressed by a new initiative, the Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA), which was set up over the summer. MILA, which is co-sponsored by CILIP and the CILIP Information Literacy Group (ILG), seeks to promote media and information in the UK as a fundamental building block for a healthy, inclusive, democratic society. It will achieve this by providing an open platform for collaboration and knowledge exchange, and by serving as a vehicle for advocacy, capacity-building, research and programme delivery.

There is an underlying and timely reason for taking forward this initiative now. In July, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) set out the UK Government’s Online Media Literacy Strategy, which includes key sections specifically on information literacy. For the first time, the UK has a national framework for media and information literacy. One of the Strategy’s key proposals is a call for better coordination between different stakeholders, across all relevant sectors, to help develop media and information literacy interventions. MILA fits neatly with this intention.

Already, MILA has attracted some attention. There have been useful conversations with DCMS and Ofcom; other organisations that have expressed an early interest include the Association for Citizenship Teaching, the Guardian Foundation, the National Literacy Trust, Newsguard, the Wikimedia Foundation and the WEA (Workers Educational Association). It’s still early days and the aim is to grow this initial list of players. An initial round-table meeting took place on 26 August, co-chaired by CILIP CEO Nick Poole and Jane Secker, Chair of ILG. This helped lay the ground for initial activities. For instance, MILA has already produced a framework which illustrates how media and information literacy relate to everyday and lifelong experiences. And the Alliance has started to scope a systematic review of media and information literacy, which will help to develop the evidence base in this area. It also has its own dedicated website.

There will be regular reports in Information Professional charting the progress of this important initiative. For further information, please contact Stéphane Goldstein.

Anyone who wants to find out more about MILA can join Nick Poole, Dr Jane Secker, and Anne-Lise Harding in a free lunchtime webinar on Thursday 28 October, from 12:00-13:00. The webinar will take place as part of UNESCO’s 10th Global MIL Week.

Details and registration

The Information Literacy Group and CILIP have announced a joint initiative to launch a new cross-sector Media and Information Literacy Alliance (http://www.mila.org.uk), with the aim of “helping people be happier, healthier, safer and better-informed in their online lives”.

Timed to coincide with the imminent announcement of the Government’s new Online Media Literacy Strategy white paper, the Alliance has already received a positive response from stakeholders in the press and broadcast media, education, Government and 3rd sector. The inaugural meeting of the Alliance will be held on the 26th August.

Welcoming the announcement, Chair of the Information Literacy Group Dr Jane Secker said, “’Media and Information Literacy’ (MIL) refers to the knowledge, skills and behaviours that people need in order to make informed judgements as users of information and media, as well as to become skilful creators and producers of information and media messages in their own right.

In a world in which we are all constantly bombarded with messages across a variety of digital platforms, we need to be ready to equip our users to make informed choices about the media they consumer and share. This new Alliance will enable us to connect with partners across industry, Government, education and the media and to develop a joined-up response to the challenges of fake news and misinformation.”

The Alliance has set out 5 areas of activity for its initial work:

• Advocacy
• Capacity-building
• Research
• Programme delivery
• Cross-sector networking & collaboration

The Alliance will also work in affiliation with the new CILIPS-supported information literacy Community of Practice in Scotland.

CILIP and the Information Literacy Group are actively soliciting expressions of interest from organisations, individuals and networks who share a common interest in the promotion of Media and Information Literacy. To register your interest, please visit http://www.mila.org.uk and complete your details via the web form.

This is a statement by the Information Literacy Group, a special interest group of the CILIP, the library and information association. Our members come from a range of backgrounds, including significant numbers of librarians and knowledge specialists within Higher and Further Education Institutions, schools, and the health and voluntary sectors.

Statement:

With the move to greater use of online training and education, we wish to raise awareness of the roles that library and knowledge specialists can play in improving the quality of online education and training resources. We strongly advise teachers, lecturers and trainers to take advantage of the expertise of librarians and knowledge specialists. Potential areas for collaboration include:

• Finding, appraising and using existing digital resources and tools, including both subscription and openly licensed content for use in education and training.
• Advising on copyright and licensing issues associated with the use of resources in online learning.
• Identifying the evidence base for research topics.
• Training and teaching in various aspects of information literacy for students and learners, which will equip them with skills to study online and to tackle the growing amounts of mis-information, dis-information and fake news.

The Information Literacy Group is here to support library and knowledge specialists in the shift to online training, by sharing case studies and resources, and facilitating knowledge sharing.

To find case studies on the shift to online information literacy teaching in schools and academic libraries see: https://infolit.org.uk/category/online-teaching-case-studies/

You can find further information on the Information Literacy Group website.

Andrew Whitworth, Manchester Institute of Education

When it was decided last year that my book, Mapping Information Landscapes, was to be published in spring 2020, who knew that this would be a time of such dramatic disruption. Leaving aside (essential) debate about the rights and wrongs of measures taken, it is clear that COVID-19 has caused a profound, immediate re-drawing of boundaries between the spaces of home, work and public life, and on a global scale.

The impact of this re-mapping varies greatly. Personally, I am used to working at home, having been teaching at a distance for many years. But I am in the fortunate minority; most others are facing a significant transition. The economic impact will fall disproportionately on those working in innately face-to-face jobs, like pubs and hotels. The vulnerability of small businesses, the self-employed and those on zero-hour or short-term contracts was obvious already, and being confirmed.

Then there are the psychological effects. The removal of our freedom to leave erodes our privacy at home, as quiet spaces and times in the house, when kids are at school or parents at work, have disappeared. Many face anxiety and basic practical problems as employers demand changes to working practices at very short notice while still, in some cases, maintaining regimes of surveillance and a belief in ‘presenteeism’. Andrew Hill and Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times describe how some staff are expected in videoconferences from 9-5, regardless of other considerations. The spaces and times of home must be reallocated to work, and not only for wage-earners; children must now follow lessons online, and the availability of the necessary devices and bandwidth does not necessarily allow everyone to work simultaneously.

Moreover, arenas for escape such as the countryside, sports, arts and pubs have been declared off-limits. We have acquired the personal space (social distancing) needed to arrest the spread of the virus at the cost of losing access to our personal places. The long-term effects of this move remain to be seen.

The value of virtuality

However, in some ways the impact of this re-mapping may be positive, at least potentially. We are being forced to look afresh at our jobs, how we organise them, and what our mental model of ‘work’ actually encompasses. Organisations that until February dismissed the notion of homeworking have changed their minds, and many may be unable to re-establish hardline opposition. Hill and Jacobs, quoted above, note how some teams and individuals may benefit from being released from the micromanagement of a weak boss, becoming freer to map work practices and timetables around their own needs, rather than the business’s. We can start revaluing other associated pratices, like commuting. “I really miss using Northern Rail” is not a phrase being uttered much around my home town.

The information landscapes that we navigate and develop at work may be enriched by outside perspectives, or “virtuality”. This means not just the use of online sources and spaces within a specific workplace context, but an “expanded interaction with… [a] professional community of practice”. Ellie Sayyad Abdi bases this idea on a study of web designers, who exploit an innately online information landscape in which boundaries between this or that organisation are greatly elided. Academics are another example: few could work properly if dependent only on the resources and spaces available in the information landscape of a single campus. Layered over each ‘epistemic community’ is an extended landscape of information, and spaces for its dissemination and exchange, including journals, conferences, public events, archives and more.

This extended landscape, and the access it provides to varying perspectives, is valuable when it comes to making informed judgments about information. Virtuality permits what Christine Bruce has called “the experience of variation” to come into play, allowing individuals and groups to triangulate viewpoints and develop a solution to a problem that amalgamates these different perspectives.

Mapping as learning

The importance of processes like triangulation; how we organise resources in our information landscapes; how landscapes incorporate both physical and virtual spaces; and how we use the interactions within them as the basis for further judgements about information and technology: all suggest the value of mapping as a way of learning our way around these landscapes and the changes now being wrought on them.

This approach is suggested by Annemaree Lloyd in her book Information Literacy Landscapes, where she describes information literacy as the constellation of practices that emerge as people learn to navigate particular information landscapes. As practitioners do this, they develop a map of that landscape. These maps are not just useful for self-organisation — that is, developing knowledge of where useful resources (texts, tools, people, etc.) reside in this landscape of practice — but can be communicated to others, and thus influence other practices, just as one can be guided through a mountain landscape by a map.

But Lloyd says nothing about what mapping might look like as an educational practice, and how people might learn, and be taught, to map usefully and effectively. This detail is offered by my book, which explores what can be learned about information landscapes through mapping them, and how we learn to use mapping itself, incorporate it and associated equipment into our other informational practices. The intention is to aim and inspire future educational interventions that use mapping, while not dictating their form.

Mapping Information Landscapes explores the impact of positioning on our informed judgements about information and technology. Quality and relevance are always influenced by factors specific to the space and time that we occupy, and that point’s relation to other elements in the landscape, both physical and informational. The close correspondence between the terms and metaphors used in navigating both geographical and information landscapes is not a coincidence: concepts such as landmarks, signposts, guidebooks, finding a vantage point and taking a survey, the following of pathways and the making of decisions at key junctions; all have cognates in both types of landscape, a proposal explored in chapter 4 of the book particularly.

Most of all, it is the practice of mapping that ties these physical and informational realms together. Through analysis of moments in the history of mapping, including the creation of the Hereford Mappa Mundi (the world’s largest surviving medieval world map) and the UK’s Ordnance Survey, the book shows how maps are representations of key information flows, and serve as nexuses of practice. Maps help people ‘know their place’ — which can be a boon to exploration of a landscape, an essential starting point, but also a limit on exploration. The authority to represent a landscape, to name its features and declare what is relevant and what should be depicted on a map is a locus of power. For example, via the work of Salvatore, the book explores how maps and images presented in popular magazines like National Geographic fuelled the informational construct that was ‘Pan-Americanism’ — a front for US domination of Latin America in the early 1900s.

But maps can also be participatory, communal, and subversive. Mapping obliges the articulation of a position, an agreement of some sort as to what should be included on the map and what it represents. Mapping is therefore a way for groups to come to an agreement about what is relevant and of value in a landscape, and to organise resources accordingly. The book makes substantial use of the work of critical geographer David Harvey, an author not previously referenced in studies of information literacy, to support the importance of ‘triangulation’ and the experience of variation. These propositions are explored in the second half of the book, which analyses both published and original research into mapping information horizons (for example, the work of Sonnenwald et al and others using that methodology) concept mapping, and dialogic or discursive mapping.

Time for new maps?

Whether graphical, textual or mental, maps are adaptable, but not necessarily instantly. The maps that we use and create represent contexts that are not temporally ‘flat’, but are instead palimpsests, formed of layers that have ‘sedimented out’ of the practices of the past. Every map therefore records the past, as much as the present, and when there emerge discrepancies between these maps and the reality with which we are faced, we suffer anxiety, feel lost and may be led into situations that are actively detrimental.

At the present time, unspoken, but long-standing agreements on what our home and public spaces are for, who has the right to enter and use them, and when, are being fundamentally challenged, and the consequent stress is palpable. Everyone is having to reassess their place in the physical and information landscapes that surround them, and what the results of this trauma will be, no one knows. But whatever they are, when this is all over we will need to learn about the world anew, and map it accordingly.

In 2010, author and professor Clay Shirky delivered a rousing TED talk in which he used the phrase ‘cognitive surplus’ to describe the one trillion hours of leisure time humans collectively have each year (a great deal of which is spent watching television), which could be harnessed to advance human knowledge through civic engagement. He concluded that: ‘free cultures get what they celebrate. [...If we] celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value [...] we’ll be able to change society’. One way that Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums (GLAMs) can harness cognitive surplus is through web-based crowdsourcing.

What can Crowdsourcing offer GLAMs?

Academic crowdsourcing invites members of the public to work with specialists to conduct research, for example, to transcribe documents or add metadata to a collection of images, video or audio clips. This data is used in real science, social science, or humanities investigations and should, ideally, lead to publication. Crowdsourcing within GLAMs may not be oriented around a specific research question or publication, but around making collections more accessible for future research and accessibility. GLAM crowdsourcing can be the seedbed of future scholarly research.

Zooniverse is the world leading research crowdsourcing platform, hosting over sixty bespoke projects in diverse subject areas, and provides a free platform where anyone can build their own project. The non-profit platform was founded at the University of Oxford in 2007 with a single crowdsourcing project called Galaxy Zoo. We now have branches at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Zooniverse has since partnered with academics and GLAM professionals around the world to produce projects in a range of STEM subjects (from astrophysics to ecology to climatology) and more recently in GLAM and humanities subjects (from papyrology to art history to renaissance English literature). Initiatives in the library sector include the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s move to classify illustrations from early periodicals and a joint initiative with the New York Public Library to transcribe historic mortgage and bond ledgers from immigrants to the city.

GLAMs have been engaging volunteers with their collections for well over a century, usually by inviting select individuals into an institution and training them to do work that cannot be done by staff due to time or money constraints. On site volunteers often build up valuable knowledge and skills and contribute a great deal to their chosen institutions, but training and supervising them also poses challenges. There is a limit to how many volunteers can be trained, supported on site, and indeed attracted and retained in the first place. Online volunteering enabled by crowdsourcing platforms, such as Zooniverse.org offer an alternative or complementary form of engagement that has many benefits. Online projects can reach a wider range of individuals—including those who are less able-bodied or unable to travel. Such projects require less training and time commitment from volunteers and typically attract a larger number of participants than on site programs.They also enable GLAMs to open up rare collections to the public without concern for their material safety and security.

How does Zooniverse work?

All bespoke Zooniverse projects, including those built on the free project builder have a few core components that differentiate them and the platform as a whole from other crowdsourcing projects and platforms. Each image, audio or video file (data point) is independently assessed by multiple individuals, whose responses are then aggregated using a variety of algorithms to determine what is in a given image. With relatively quick tasks, such as animal identification in Snapshot Serengeti, upwards of 70 people will see each image, whereas with more complex text transcription tasks, three to 10 people will do each line or page (depending on the project). Studies have found that non-expert classifiers are nearly as good as experts, with Zooniverse data used in well over 100 publications.[i] All projects have an object-oriented discussion forum called Talk. Here volunteers can ask questions, interact with researchers and fellow volunteers, create their own ‘collections’, and use hashtags to group together areas of interest. An example of the latter is #female from the Science Gossip project, which indicates mention of female proto-citizen scientists of the nineteenth century.

Another important feature is the ability to address project datasets where they are too large to be processed in house. The Zooniverse platform offers the chance to engage people with a large-scale dataset that might otherwise be neglected. In the GLAM context this offers the chance to profile collections that are unlikely ever to be transcribed or analysed in greater detail by existing staff.

Zooniverse in Action

The first Zooniverse humanities project was Ancient Lives, which invited volunteers to transcribe ancient papyri one letter at a time using a clickable keyboard on their screen. Volunteers only needed to character match and did not have to be fluent in ancient Greek. Real time translation of transcriptions gave volunteers the chance to understand the texts they were working on, and flag up discoveries of unknown works by ancient writers. A blog kept volunteers up to date with the research team’s work and explained how the crowdsourced data was being used. The team of 250,000+ volunteers made more than 1.5 million transcriptions between 2011 and 2014.

The next Zooniverse humanities project was Operation War Diary, launched in 2014 to commemorate the outbreak of the First World War. This partnership between the National Archives (UK), the Imperial War Museum, and Zooniverse invites users to tag and transcribe dates, times, places, and names found in British WWI field diaries. Volunteers are also asked to interpret the diaries by adding tags from a drop down list, such as coming under fire, recuperation, eating, sport, and so on. Historian Richard Grayson has used the data to penetrate more deeply than ever before into records of soldiers’ daily lives on the front.[ii]

All of the project metadata will eventually be integrated into the National Archive catalogues, although not as soon as hoped due to character length limitations in the free text field originally designated to hold the material. This limitation raises an important for any GLAM specialist seeking to harness crowdsourcing at their institution: does your content management system (CMS) support the storage of extra metadata and if not where can you make the results of a crowdsourcing project available? Github is a viable option, as is a bespoke website maintained by your institution, but be sure to investigate this before embarking on a crowdsourcing project. 

In the case of project AnnoTate, a partnership between Tate archives and museums and Zooniverse, a new CMS is able to accommodate the large amounts of free text and extra metadata. Tate wanted to create a crowdsourcing project as a means of democratizing access to their collections of artists’ sketchbooks, letters, diaries and other papers: documents that are not typically accessible to non-specialists. As of November 2016 the project has attracted 1,323 registered volunteers and many unregistered visitors, who have retired 10,464 pages. Retirement in this case means that each line has been transcribed by at least three people whose transcriptions concur on 95% of the characters in the line with anaverage agreement of 97%.

In developing AnnoTate and Shakespeare’s World, my driving research question was: how could we simplify the rather difficult task of full text transcription? This was particularly the case for the early modern English manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library (our Shakespeare’s World partner). I drew inspiration from Ancient Lives and Operation War Diary, as well as the less likely muse: Penguin Watch. 

Ancient Lives taught me that it’s possible to make hard tasks accessible through the right interface design. What could have been a project targeted at specialists became instead, a project for anyone capable of pattern recognition. In Shakespeare’s World volunteers transcribe using their keyboard, but can also click buttons on their transcription box on the screen to capture frequently occurring brevigraphs (handwritten abbreviations) such as ‘ye’ for the, or wch for which, etc. This approach blends the Ancient Lives functionality with regular typing. 

Operation War Diary is too complex and asks too much time of users. My advice to you is to keep your project workflow concise and compelling and focus on the most important aspect of the data for your institution or researchers? A successful crowdsourcing project does not attempt to gather all of the available information, but to gather a comprehensive and meaningful strand of information about a given collection. The free project builder means you can readily launch another project to tackle different aspects of the same dataset. 

Penguin Watch, which just asks you to click on individual penguins, taught me the beauty (and addictiveness) of simplicity. I wanted to bring simplicity and brevity to transcription, and so both AnnoTate and Shakespeare’s World allow users to transcribe a single line or short phrase at a time, by clicking on either side of a line or phrase and transcribing it into a pop-up box. Although a page might be complex, long or hard to read, most people can spare a minute or less to transcribe a line. Grey dots appear around lines that are deemed complete by our algorithms, which redirect people’s efforts to unfinished lines. To date Shakespeare’s World has 2,479 registered volunteers as well as non-registered people who have submitted 87,433 lines of transcription and retired 2,819 pages. 

The tools underlying projects such as Penguin Watch and Galaxy Zoo are already available on the free project builder, while full text and audio transcription tools are currently under development with the generous support of an Institute of Museums and Libraries grant. Text transcription will probably be available in 2017, followed by audio transcription tools in 2018 and 2019. 

Get Involved 

GLAM organizations keen to develop their own crowdsourcing projects should explore the available documentation on how to build a project, and best practices), which guide you through the design, launch and long term phases of a project. While building a project is easy and requires relatively little technical support from Zooniverse or your institution, make sure you have the time to support your volunteers. Zooniverse’s Talk, social media such as blogging, Twitter, Instagram, and indeed in person or on site events all provide important channels for engaging volunteers with your collections. Crowdsourcing projects, like puppies and kittens, are not just for Christmas. 

References

[i] Alexandra Swanson et al, ‘Snapshot Serengeti, High-Frequency Annotated Camera Trap Images of 40 Mammalian Species in an African Savanna’, Scientific Data, 2 (2015) .Swanson and others.

[ii] Richard Grayson, ‘A Life in the Trenches? The Use of Operation War Diary and Crowdsourcing Methods to Provide an Understanding of the British Army’s Day-to-Day Life on the Western Front’, British Journal for Military History, 2.2 (2016), 160–85.

Banner image credit: compilation of Heath Van Singel designed Zooniverse logos via Wikipedia, original resized and cropped (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Screenshots of Ancient Lives and Shakespeare’s World transcription keyboards provided by Dr Victoria Van Hyning.

About the author

Dr Victoria Van Hyning is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University. In 2014–2015 she worked as a Digital Humanities postdoctoral fellow at Zooniverse.org, where she led the development of Science Gossip, AnnoTate and Shakespeare's World. She is now the Humanities PI of Zooniverse, and uses data from Shakespeare's World in her British Academy research.

Most college students have been exposed to more technology than students of previous generations. This does not make them technology experts.  Students do a lot of searching online for information. This does not make them expert, or even good, searchers. Thanks to Google, students can always find information on any topic.  This does not mean that they have found true, accurate, useful information and does not make them expert finders of information. Students need instruction and guidance in learning how to find, evaluate, select and use information, just as they need instruction and guidance in learning anything else. They are not born "information literate" and frequent, uninstructed Googling will not make them so.

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

The Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (the Association of College and Research Libraries' new "guide" to Information Literacy) is meant to explain the theory behind information literacy and the threshold concepts that students must incorporate into their thinking to become information literate.  

The Framework document says:

"The Framework offered here is called a framework intentionally because it is based on a cluster of interconnected core concepts with flexible options for implementation, rather than on a set of standards or learning outcomes, or any prescriptive enumeration of skills.....Neither knowledge practices nor the dispositions that support each concept are intended to prescribe what local institutions should do in using the Framework; each library and its partners on campus will need to deploy these frames to best fit their own situation, including designing learning outcomes."

How to teach students information literacy

While the "framework" provides a description of what a person who is information literate looks like and does with regard to information, the framework does not provide the answer we all want--How do we get our students to that goal?  The bad news is that the Framework is not going to help answer that question. The good news is that everything we have created up to this point is still relevant.  While some lessons may need to be updated and/or broadened to incorporate new types of information delivery or new groups from whom we can get information, the core of what students need to know to become information literate remains the same.  Students need to know how to find information, how to evaluate information, how to select information, how to apply information to a problem, and how to use information ethically and legally.

Here are 6 suggestions about how to offer students the concepts and skills that will set them on the road to information literacy.

1. Take them from the familiar to the less familiar to the unfamiliar.  

Everyone I know uses Google on a regular basis.  The single search box is convenient, doesn’t require anything in the way of search strategy or specific language.  Most people have no idea that Google has an advanced search, much less how to use it.  In fact, Google no longer offers a link to its advanced search page from the basic search page.  Instead one must click on “settings” and select the advanced search.  

Have students do a Google search for global warming in the single search box. They will get links to millions of pages returned to them.  Show them how to get to the advanced Google search page and have them use some of the search options to transform a giant search into something with a meaningful result.  From there, you might transition to a subject specific database, where students will find much more targeted information, making more of the information they find applicable to their information need.

2. Make students mentally stretch to make a lesson more memorable 

If you want students to evaluate the information they find, ask them to determine what qualities make information credible, accurate, and reliable.  You can then ask them to evaluate information you supply against their list of criteria.  The supplied information may provoke changes in the list of evaluation criteria.  For example:

• The hoax website Dihydrogen Monoxide should make students consider evaluation of the content  
• The website offering a scientific study on feline reactions to bearded men should make students consider evaluation of the bibliographic references.  
• The website of Dr. David Duke, a white supremacist, should make students consider the author and author’s credentials.

3. Selection and application of information is critical 

There are thousands of webpages devoted to the recent Brexit from the European Union, many of them able to pass the evaluation test.  But every website does not provide information relevant to the same information need.  So a student seeking to answer a question about the effect of Brexit on Poland will need to select information targeting that effect and not information about how the term Brexit was created.  
I have found it useful to put students into teams to role play a “real life” situation.  Students become researchers who must provide information to the CEO of the company they work for.  The CEO will base a decision about the future of the company on the information supplied.  Big money is at stake, as well as job security for the researchers.  The information must be on the CEO’s desk within the hour. A class presentation allows for discussion and critique of sources selected, sources discarded, sources undiscovered, and so on.

4. Get students to think about the consequences of plagiarism

Ethical concerns for students about the use of information usually center on the issues of citation of sources and plagiarism.  Students I have spoken to know they need to cite sources.  They know there are penalties for plagiarism, sometimes very harsh penalties.  They simply don’t know when to do it.  Is a citation required for paraphrasing?  Is a citation required for a quote?  How does one cite a quote from one person in a document from another person?  Providing students with a little practice in thinking through what a citation is for and what it accomplishes will go a long way to providing them with the answers to their questions.  As to the format for citations, there is software that will do that—much of it free.  Direct students to those tools and they will be forever grateful.

Get students to think about the ethical, economic and social consequences of plagiarism.  Have them look into the specifics of incidents of plagiarism that have had serious consequences (George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord vs. the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine, for example).  Discuss the nature of intellectual property and fair use.

5. The role of the individual in the information world is expanding 

Students are both consumers and producers of information.  Students should be made aware that they can create and disseminate of information and discuss what that means for them in terms of both opportunity and responsibility. For some audiences the student can be an authority. Students can add perspective and new ideas to groups working on projects or problems by participating in blogs, listservs and other interactive discussion groups.  Students can create their own publications for issues of importance to them and make those publications available to the world.

Have students subscribe to and follow a blog that covers an academic topic over a specified time period.  Ask them to write about or discuss their experience, considering the positive and negative aspects of this form of communication, the quality of the information, the variety of people who participate, and whether or not the blog helps move the world forward in terms of the subject under discussion.

6. Apply the same skills to the “real world”

Students often fail to understand that what they learn in one classroom can often be useful in the next classroom, and that concepts and skills they learn in an academic setting can translate to applications in the “real world”.  The human brain works by analogy—comparing new information to information already in storage and looking for similarities. The use of analogies in the classroom can help students think about how one idea might apply in a completely different situation.

Get students to brainstorm steps to take when gathering information for a term paper. Write the ideas on a flip chart or white board.  Ask students to then suggest non-academic scenarios where the same process could be helpful.  (Buying a cell phone, planning a two-week vacation in an unfamiliar location, writing an annual report for work, finding a nursing home for an elderly relative, etc.)

To summarize, students need to learn basic concepts and skills in order to become information literate as students and as citizens of the world.  Make students active participants in their own learning.  Allow them to stretch their understanding through discussion and exploration. Get them to actively participate.  Ask them to grapple with the big ethical and social questions.  The instruction you have already developed is likely still relevant and useful so don’t start from the beginning, but build on what you have already created.

About Teaching Information Literacy Reframed

Teaching Information Literacy Reframed by Joanna M Burkhardt offers a starting point to understanding and teaching the six threshold concepts listed in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, an altogether new way of looking at information literacy.

Buy the book

Header image: Class group icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY / original placed on new canvas

Research tells us that recent college graduates lack the skills needed to find the best answers to solve problems in the workplace. They lack persistence and rely on initial search results rather than using more sophisticated strategies. They also struggle with finding reliable information for every day life needs, such as buying a car or making a health decision.

Librarians need to take the lead in helping people search more strategically. 

We need to help our users:

1. Focus first on the best source for a piece of information
2. Avoid the psychological traps that can occur during the search process
3. Understand the power and limitations of information from a crowd, an amateur, and an expert. 
4. Investigate, like a detective, the context of a piece of information.
5. Corroborate a piece of information differently, based on circumstances.
6. Make conscious decisions about how far to go when vetting a piece of information.

Step One: Admit there is a Problem

Several years ago I was attending a conference at Harvard University. Two brilliant educators were presenting, and we were all listening with rapt attention as a busy back channel of questions were popping up on the screen behind the speakers.  

One question kept surfacing:

What are the best sources for us to learn more about this topic?

As the speakers tuned in to address this question, I could feel the audience lean forward, pulling out phones and slips of paper to jot down the key articles and books these experts would recommend. Instead, my heart sank as both speakers said: 

“Well… if you Google these words, you’ll find a lot of information out there.”

Really?

Down the Information Rabbit Hole

This event and dozens of experiences like it, led me to think more deeply about how we go about finding reliable information. After twenty years of teaching information literacy at the university level I decided to take a step back and rethink everything I knew about evaluating information and locating credible content. 

I embarked on a series of “information adventures” by choosing topics I was interested in and taking a deep dive into how best to go about finding and evaluating the information I uncovered. I spent months investigating whether red wine has health advantages, whether dogs exhibit some rudimentary form of empathy, and the degree to which one can trust user review sites for travel, restaurants, and products. I also dug deeply into the research on information evaluation: on the credibility of Wikipedia, the veracity of user reviews in different venues, and investigations on how Google, Facebook, WebMD and other tools determine what information they serve to us.

Though I consider myself an expert on information literacy, I was shocked to discover how much I did not know. As I plummeted down the information rabbit hole I learned about blackhat and white hat search engine optimization, astroturfing, the Deep Web, the Internet Water Army, native advertising, and fascinating psychological concepts such as herding behavior, “proof by repeated assertion,” self-reinforcing information spirals, and the persuasive intent heuristic.

The Top 5 Hits in Google = Reliable Information?

Research tells us that people overly rely on Google and that they assume that what comes up in the top five hits in a Google search is the most reliable information to be found on a topic. For certain kinds of searches Google is often terrific, but for many searches Google is not able to keep on top of the search engine optimizers, and Google itself manipulates search results for commercial gain. Appearing in the top five results of a Google search sometimes has little correlation with being trustworthy.

Three years of delving into the research from many different angles and disciplines led to a book describing my investigations: Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth.The book uses storytelling to describe my information quests, and it boils down my three-year trek on finding reliable information into six key strategies. 

The following is a brief introduction to these strategies.

1. Start at the Source

The most important conclusion I reached was that we need to shift our thinking and focus more on locating a reliable source for the information that is being sought rather than just hopping on a search engine or database and seeing what information floats to the top.This seemingly simple but complex idea involves conceptually changing the focus of the search: To hunt for a source for the information first and then the information itself. By taking control of the sources viewed, half the job of evaluation is completed up front, before even reading a piece of information.

Starting at the source might involve a simple decision such as beginning a search with Google Scholar instead of Google, but it sometimes involves a lengthier and more sophisticated strategy.

2. The Psychology of Search

As I devised strategies to answer my research questions I uncovered a new (to me) area that I call the “psychology of search.” This strategy looks at the psychological baggage we bring to the search process. We have a tremendous impact on our search results: the potential for bias in how we ask questions, how easily we are “satisfied” or willing to settle, the influence of “name” brands and reputations, and social factors all influence our search results. By developing metacognitive habits - thinking about how we are thinking – we can adjust our search behavior so that we are not easily swayed by unreliable information.

Daniel Kahneman’s research on fast and slow thinking and the current research coming out on information heuristics underlines how much the psychology behind the search impacts our results. Information heuristics are types of shortcuts we often take in searching for information. For example, the Bandwagon Heuristic involves assuming that if many others think something is correct, it must be correct. Heuristics can be a double-edged sword: they can reduce the amount of cognitive effort used in information seeking, but they can also lead to systematic biases or errors in judgment.

3. Expert, Amateur, Crowd.

As I studied the reliability of experts and investigated the concept of crowd wisdom I went deep into the research on how we define expertise and also explored the necessary components needed to achieve a “wisdom of the crowds” effect.

By understanding when expertise can be valuable and when a crowd or an amateur can contribute reliable information, people can then make a conscious decision on where to look for information and what types of information can be trusted. There are not always easy answers: For high stakes searches often a combination of types of information is desirable, but there are also times when expertise provides richer, more complex, and more reliable information. For a medical decision we may want to consult an expert, but for dating advice a peer might be the superior source.

4. Context, Motivation, and Bias. 

Context relates to everything surrounding the information including the motivation for the search you are conducting: Pub bet? Research paper? And context also includes determining the purpose of a piece of information, understanding how it was constructed, whether it was vetted, edited, peer reviewed, and formally published. By figuring out context we can better understand the motivation and potential bias of a piece of information.

Many of us rely on a few trusted sources for many of our information needs, but we need to be both flexible and skeptical and adjust our strategies according to the importance of a particular search. Often we will want to take charge and control the context ourselves: if we are researching bee colony collapse we might want to search a biology or science database such as PLOS.org, rather than rely on what comes up first on Google: a four paragraph article from Forbes suggesting a simple cause of colony collapse and surrounded by advertisements.

5. Comparison and Corroboration.

Scholarly research involves basing new research on previous findings. Research is not conducted in a vacuum. When carrying out a comprehensive literature review on a scholarly topic, comparison and corroboration are built into the process. But for many every-day-life searches we pop in and look for a quick answer. If we pop in to an extremely trustworthy source and the information topic is a low stakes issue, we may need to use only a bare bones comparison and corroboration process. But even confirming a simple piece of information can be challenging because so much information is rebroadcast and regurgitated across the web. The comparison process needs to involve using independent resources and the corroboration process involves unpacking the factual claims and confirming that they hold up. 

6. Going Deep, or Not. 

Searching for information is an iterative process fraught with continual choices: where to look, how far to go, how many sources to read, what types of sources to go after. Taking a piece of information and uncovering the back-story –and every piece of information has a back-story—can be a lengthy process. How was it created? Who is this author? What is the purpose? Do others agree? What is it based on? An important component of the search process is recognizing when a quick piece of information will suffice and when it is going to be a long night.

Do you think people are beginning to understand the limitations of a Google search and are realizing they may need to develop more sophisticated search strategies to find reliable information?

About the book

Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth by Leslie F. Stebbins uses stories or "information adventures" to illustrate the best approaches to searching for information and to help us develop our aptitude for locating high quality resources in a rapidly changing digital environment that is becoming proficient at monopolizing our attention with useless or unreliable information.

Safer Internet Day 2016

Today, 9 February 2016, is Safer Internet Day, which is a celebration that sees hundreds of organisations get involved to help promote the safe, responsible and positive use of digital technology for children and young people. It is coordinated in the UK by the UK Safer Internet Centre.

This year's theme is to inspire a kind, respectful and inclusive internet, and help raise awareness about the issue of online hate.

CILIP is a supporter of Safer Internet Day and believes that librarians and information professionals, especially school librarians and children’s specialists in public libraries, have a vital role in teaching children effective and safe use of the internet and pointing them to online resources. They also advise parents, carers and others with responsibilities for children.

People have been talking about digital libraries for about a quarter century now, but we still argue about what they are and where they are going.

In Exploring Digital Libraries, I endeavor to sort out both. While I do offer a definition of what the phrase “digital libraries” means in the context of current research and practice, the truth is that myriad diffuse definitions and opinions about digital libraries continue being expressed. 

There are even more perspectives on where digital libraries are going. Last week I asked some colleagues to send me one sentence each on the topic of digital libraries in this time of large-scale, web- and network-driven societal change.  This somewhat kaleidoscopic, crowdsourced blog post is my attempt to weave together what they sent me.

I have arranged their 10 contributions in 4 sections:

• Digital libraries and the social web: collections to communities?
• Overcoming barriers and seizing opportunities for transformation
• “Social” digital libraries, the semantic web and scholarship
• “Conscious coordination” of strategic actions

Digital libraries and the social web: evolving from collections to communities?

1. “You can see the development of digital libraries from collections of stuff to communities of interest.”
R. David Lankes,  author of The Atlas of New Librarianship

In their first 25 years, digital libraries have demonstrated their value for broadening access to content, supporting the free flow of ideas, and empowering and informing individuals.  

Today, in the context of the participatory web and a highly networked society, digital libraries of all types can also underpin community-based creation, annotation, contribution, sharing, re-use and re-aggregations of content. 

2. “Some library attempts to apply social web concepts and tools are failing, because they merely promote what libraries are doing, instead of using these new tools to establish and maintain relationships, or to help their communities do what they want to do.”
Carol Diedrichs, Vice Provost and Director of University Libraries, Ohio State University

Digital libraries have tended to offer simple, read-only information access to collections. As the web has evolved into a more social place, users have come to expect more interactive, community-centered sites. Attracting and growing active online communities will require disassembling digital libraries’ traditional collections-centered focus.     

3. “Public libraries need to convert their highly engaged users (30% according to the U.S. Pew Research Center) into digital user communities that are involved in co-creating library-related information in various domains.”
Maurits van der Graaf,  senior consultant for Pleiade Management and Consultancy

Digital library crowdsourcing takes advantage of the collective efforts and intelligence of online communities. The crowdsourcing model aggregates talent and leverages ingenuity while reducing the costs and time needed to create valuable content, correct errors, or solve large-scale problems.

Examples of promising results include the Europeana 1914-1918 initiative, the digital program for historic newspapers of the National Library of Australia’s Trove service, and an online initiative to crowdsource the georeferencing of historical maps. 

Overcoming barriers and seizing opportunities for transformation

4. “Digital libraries will begin to realize their full potential when the librarians who build them accept two propositions: first, that digital collections should be built with the needs and practices of end users (rather than librarians) in mind, and second, that public-domain materials should be made as freely and openly available to the public as possible.”
Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections at University of Utah; contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen

New technologies and web-based practices for information seeking, learning, teaching, research, professional recognition, work, recreation and socializing provide a framework that offers the possibility to shift the focus and core assumptions of digital libraries in favor of new ways of thinking about services, expectations and levels of community involvement.

In this context, it has become a pressing matter for libraries to embrace both the web’s “principles of participation” and those of open access. 

5. “HathiTrust is a game-changer for everything … enabling the protection of the past as well as the ability to take the future in different directions.” 
Sarah Pritchard, Dean of Libraries, Northwestern University; editor, portal: Libraries and the Academy

At 2011 digitization rates, the HathiTrust Digital Library was projected to duplicate 60% of the retrospective collections of the 125 North American libraries that make up the Association of Research Libraries by June 2014.  

It is beginning to look as if services based on mass-digitization of books, if tested in litigation in U.S. courts, will be deemed fair uses of this content, based on the most recent decisions in the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case.

Eventual removal of some or many of the current legal obstacles has the potential to transform how not only legacy library collections, but current ones are managed and shared, not to speak of enabling innovative uses for more people in more places and contexts.

6. “Many research libraries persist in investing the lion’s share of time and resources in the management of print collections; they must shift the balance to respond to the emergence of innovative digital scholarship and its requirements, such as research data management.”
Sarah Thomas, formerly Bodley’s Librarian; presently Vice President for the Harvard Library

The social dimension of library sustainability involves visibility, community awareness and perceived relevance. The strategic agendas for digital and traditional libraries must merge; it simply makes no sense to continue separate, parallel lines of development.

All research library collections and services must operate and demonstrate their value in the context of today’s web and emerging new requirements for scholarship. 

“Social” digital libraries, the semantic web and scholarship

7. “The core assumption that a digital library will be a destination site on the web is rapidly shifting in face of the realization that digital libraries must  be integrated more fully with the web, web technologies, and how and where people seek for information. The whole Europeana concept—distributing open, aggregated data into other systems so it can be found and used in many different ways—is a fascinating path into the future.” 
Jennifer Younger, Executive Director, Catholic Research Resources Alliance

A requirement for today’s digital libraries is full integration with the web on two fronts: with how different communities work, learn, and play on the web; and with web technology as it evolves.

As the social web’s impact is felt, digital libraries must commit to not only fully understanding (and designing for) their audiences, but also to openly disclosing their content and services in many external contexts (for both humans and machines). 

8. “Libraries are rapidly emerging as physical and intellectual centers of digital scholarship, offering support and resources for exploring networks of linked open data repositories containing content of high scholarly value and conforming to semantic web rules and standards.” 
Stephen Griffin, Visiting Professor and Mellon Cyberscholar, University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences

An outcome of the first two decades of digital libraries was a keen understanding of the importance of techniques and infrastructure supporting interoperability and linking across disparate web resources and sites. Today’s “third wave” of digital library researchers and practitioners are contributing substantially to the work to build linked datasets and contribute them to the semantic web of data. For the thousands of repositories now supporting scholarship, the promise of this work is an interconnected ecology of web-based data resources offering substantial new functionalities to users.  This purposively-coordinated scholarly information environment will naturally promote collaborative work, data stewardship and support altogether new models of scholarly communication across disciplines. 

9. “Systematic assignment of ORCID identifiers to researchers of their academic institutes will revolutionize the contents recruitment for institutional repositories as this will enable harvesting from publication platforms and relieve the researchers of a large part of the burden of depositing.”
Maurits van der Graaf

ORCID (Open Contributor and Researcher ID) is a non-proprietary, independent registry to enable global, centralized author identification and provide a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.

The initiative began in 2009, and as of this writing, there are over 820,000 ORCID IDs in existence. The ORCID effort has the potential for a large-scale uptake of linkable identifiers by scholars and significant advancement of a global infrastructure supporting scholarly communications.

If it succeeds (and along the way, makes the many disparate researcher identification systems around the world more interoperable), it will be a massive force for advancing not just scholarly networking, but also deposit rates for institutional repositories (as suggested above) and furthermore, the feasibility of a semantic, global web of remixable scholarly data. 

“Conscious coordination” of strategic actions

10. “The portion of the scholarly and cultural record that a single digital library can hope to collect and make available is growing smaller as the volume, diversity and complexity of digital content increases and custodial responsibility expands. To provide local access to the full scholarly and cultural record, more trusted relationships across organizations and “conscious coordination” of collecting and stewardship will be needed.”

Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist, OCLC;  co-chair,  Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

Most digital libraries continue to operate from a traditional, siloed, collections-centered service model. Strategic visions for collective action across libraries are the exception rather than the rule.

After more than two decades of research and practice, digital libraries are moving to the mainstream, but the digital libraries we need in the future may not resemble digital libraries as they have been.

The social web and emergent forms of digital scholarship open the door to new possibilities; seizing them will require community-centered strategies, collective approaches and cooperative infrastructure that are aligned with the large changes shaping the web and society. 

Buy Exploring Digital Libraries from Facet Publishing

About the author

Karen Calhoun is a librarian, writer and international speaker with wide-ranging experience leading libraries in the digital age. She has directed strategic initiatives at Cornell, OCLC and the University of Pittsburgh.